Throughout her career, Elinor Carucci has focused her
camera on family members, beginning with her mother, to explore her own
relationships and identity. “When I was twenty-two, she put lipstick on my
lips, her lipstick,” she wrote. “This was one of many things that were both,
somehow, continuity and separation. My own femininity yet always drawing on
hers.” Over the years, Carucci zoomed in tighter, finding that the closer she got,
the more universal the meaning of the work became. “A mark on the skin, a
stitch, a hair, an eye, a kiss—carried the work beyond the boundaries of my
family.”