Tender Option ​by Buck Ellison

Above: 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 is scheduled to be part of 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 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.
Anjunabeats - Above & Beyond
Product modeling for the EDM band Above & Beyond. Photos by Harp Digital Media.
Apple iPhone 12
Photo by Vania Heymann
IZIP Electric Bikes
Photos by Jim Maher

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.”​
- Christopher Knight, Los Angeles Times, November 10 2020
"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."
- Buck Ellison, interview with  Michael Beckert
​W Magazine, July 1, 2020
"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.
​- Ekow Eshun, Aperture, Fall 2020
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