LIFE
FORCE
The magazine of the photo-essay
August 2017 back issue
“A free, really high quality photo-essay magazine. Fabulous!”
Stephen Fry. British actor, writer and film maker
by Elinor Carucci
My babies, Eden and Emmanuelle, were born in August that year. After
a blissful pregnancy, I had to be induced and ended up with an emergency
Caesarean section which left me wounded, weak and in pain. A few days
later I came home, into my new life as a mother of two, filled with so many
emotions: joy and wonder and love and happiness coexisted with sadness,
exhaustion, anxiety, mourning the body I would never have again, the
woman I would never be again.
I felt and saw so much, beauty and ugliness, crying and laughter, the
extremes that you get to know when you are a new parent. I tried to
somehow deal with it all, through my camera, hoping to portray this
complex experience as honestly as I could. It was too intense, too rich, to
express only through ‘Madonna and child’-like images; not that I did not
also have those magical, more peaceful moments with my babies, and I did take this kind of photo, but there was so
much more to tell, to show.
Being my children's mother, I watch them as I raise them, learning so much, seeing so much. Photographing them forces
me to see even more, and they to show me more. Even when they are not with me, my new ways of seeing are still there, I
see more of the world around me. I have never seen as much as I do now, as a mother.
A doll in a box, 2010.
Bath, 2006.
Bath, 2006.
Emmanuelle having her hair cut 2007.
Feeling me, 2004.
Love, 2009.
Mother, 2012.
The woman that I still am #2, 2010.
Thirty-eight years old, 2009.
Why can't you be nicer to your brother? 2012.
