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Tender Option by Buck EllisonAbove: The Prince Children, Holland, Michigan
Left: Dick and Betsey, The Ritz-Carlton, Dallas, Texas This photo series premiered in an exhibition at The Sunday Painter in London. Since then, it was featured at Galerie Conradi in Hamburg and the Made in LA 2020 exhibition at The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. A review for the exhibit in The Los Angeles Times praises The Prince Children directly, calling the piece "most haunting." Both photos were featured in The New Yorker in 2021 and a W Magazine article interviewing Ellison, and The Prince Children made it into the Fall 2020 issue of Aperture. It was also on the cover of the book The Image of Whiteness, an academic work on photography that deconstructs and critiques how race is portrayed in art. The book received praise from The Guardian. The series is also published in Ellison's first photo book, Living Trust, which won the 2020 Paris Photobook Award for Best First Photobook. |
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Anjunabeats - Above & Beyond
Product modeling for the EDM band Above & Beyond. Photos by Harp Digital Media.
Product modeling for the EDM band Above & Beyond. Photos by Harp Digital Media.
Apple iPhone 12
Photo by Vania Heymann
Photo by Vania Heymann
IZIP Electric Bikes
Photos by Jim Maher |
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Press Features
"Buck Ellison’s photographs, fabrications staged with actors, assess the underside of white identity. Most haunting is a deft family portrait that shows a 6-year-old Erik Prince, who went on to found the private military contractor Academi (formerly Blackwater), and his teenage sister Betsy DeVos, later U.S. Secretary of Education, as something recalling creatures who might have escaped from “The Omen.” |
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"Ellison, who is based in Los Angeles, almost exclusively hires local actors and models to play the ersatz bluebloods who populate his pictures, and he inserts them into rigorously stage-managed scenarios that he devises beforehand... Ellison goads us to contemplate not just the existence of an American ruling class, with its idiosyncratic and easily satirizable mores and style codes, but the invisible lineaments of wealth, power, and race that undergird its existence." |
"When my casting director and I scout subjects, we show them my work, explain the project, sign releases, etc. The work takes me places that are extremely strange and uncomfortable, so I’m honored that these actors are willing to go there with me." |
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"Ellison's photographs, a selection of which appears in The Image of Whiteness, seem to document the habits and tastes of affluent whites... The imagined portraits strive to convey normalcy, but there's an unsettling undercurrent to them that hints at what F. Scott Fitzgerald's narrator in The Great Gatsby calls the "vast carelessness" of the rich. |
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