BUCK ELLISON
PHOTOGRAPHER
Buck Ellison
Los Angeles-based Buck Ellison is a contemporary photographer and filmmaker whose compelling and often satirical exploration of American cultural and societal norms broadly investigates the language of privilege through meticulously crafted images that initiate conversations on class and inequality.
Precisely composed and staged to create thought-provoking narratives that challenge conventional perceptions, Ellison’s cinematic portfolio is characterized by a keen sense of irony and a subtle critique of the idiosyncrasies embedded in American life. His images often portray depictions of wealth and aspiration executed through staged settings and performative interventions into the visual language of photography, with scenes that border on the surreal. Ellison’s compositions are visually striking, drawing viewers into a world where each element serves a purpose in conveying his narrative.
A recurring theme in Ellison’s work is the examination of societal expectations and how whiteness and privilege are sustained and broadcast. He navigates these themes with a nuanced touch, using humor and a touch of absurdity to highlight the contradictions inherent in contemporary American culture. The subjects in his photographs, whether individuals or tableaux, seem frozen in a moment of heightened tension, inviting viewers to question the assumptions embedded in the scenes he presents. With references to seventeenth-century Dutch family portraits, Ellison plants codes in his compositions, telling details that act as clues with the obsessive stamina to painstakingly bring them to life.
Ellison’s work also engages with the visual language of advertising and commercial photography, often adopting the glossy aesthetic associated with these genres to subvert their conventions. By appropriating and recontextualizing these visual cues, he prompts viewers to reconsider the messages and values perpetuated by mainstream media.
Through his provocative and visually compelling photography, Ellison invites audiences to reflect on the complexities of American society, challenging them to question the status quo and consider the deeper implications of the seemingly mundane. His creative approach pushes the boundaries of traditional photography, using the medium as a tool for social commentary and cultural critique.
Ellison has photographed campaigns for Balenciaga, Martine Rose x Tommy Hilfiger, and Nike and editorials for Arena Hommes+, Document Journal, The New York Times, POP Magazine, Vogue Hommes, and Vogue Italia. His first monograph, ‘Living Trust,’ published by Loose Joints, won the Paris Photo-Aperture Best PhotoBook Award 2020. His films and photographs are in the permanent collections of the Aïshti Foundation, Beirut; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and The Whitney Museum of American Art.
Los Angeles-based Buck Ellison is a contemporary photographer and filmmaker whose compelling and often satirical exploration of American cultural and societal norms broadly investigates the language of privilege through meticulously crafted images that initiate conversations on class and inequality.
Precisely composed and staged to create thought-provoking narratives that challenge conventional perceptions, Ellison’s cinematic portfolio is characterized by a keen sense of irony and a subtle critique of the idiosyncrasies embedded in American life. His images often portray depictions of wealth and aspiration executed through staged settings and performative interventions into the visual language of photography, with scenes that border on the surreal. Ellison’s compositions are visually striking, drawing viewers into a world where each element serves a purpose in conveying his narrative.
A recurring theme in Ellison’s work is the examination of societal expectations and how whiteness and privilege are sustained and broadcast. He navigates these themes with a nuanced touch, using humor and a touch of absurdity to highlight the contradictions inherent in contemporary American culture. The subjects in his photographs, whether individuals or tableaux, seem frozen in a moment of heightened tension, inviting viewers to question the assumptions embedded in the scenes he presents. With references to seventeenth-century Dutch family portraits, Ellison plants codes in his compositions, telling details that act as clues with the obsessive stamina to painstakingly bring them to life.
Ellison’s work also engages with the visual language of advertising and commercial photography, often adopting the glossy aesthetic associated with these genres to subvert their conventions. By appropriating and recontextualizing these visual cues, he prompts viewers to reconsider the messages and values perpetuated by mainstream media.
Through his provocative and visually compelling photography, Ellison invites audiences to reflect on the complexities of American society, challenging them to question the status quo and consider the deeper implications of the seemingly mundane. His creative approach pushes the boundaries of traditional photography, using the medium as a tool for social commentary and cultural critique.
Ellison has photographed campaigns for Balenciaga, Martine Rose x Tommy Hilfiger, and Nike and editorials for Arena Hommes+, Document Journal, The New York Times, POP Magazine, Vogue Hommes, and Vogue Italia. His first monograph, ‘Living Trust,’ published by Loose Joints, won the Paris Photo-Aperture Best PhotoBook Award 2020. His films and photographs are in the permanent collections of the Aïshti Foundation, Beirut; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and The Whitney Museum of American Art.
“As conversations about race, racism, and inequality surge into the mainstream, Ellison remains one of the only artists describing the myths of white male power from within its walls.”
Best Reply
Presented at Barbati Gallery in September 2023, ‘Best Reply’ is Ellison’s first solo show in Italy. This exhibition presents a series of ten new photographs, alongside a five- photograph series from 2018, which tell a simple story: two brothers take friends to their family’s ski house, which they refer to as ‘the cabin.’ Amid games, snowball fights, and puzzles, a subtle romance unfolds. The artist also plays a game here: is it possible to visually represent the act of not talking about money?
‘Muddy Children’ depicts the game Salad Bowl, where players guess words from clues, but are forbidden to say certain taboo words. In Regency England, discussing money was deemed vulgar, partly due to its potential to steer dialogue toward the topic of slavery. A brutal network of forced labor played a central role in the British Empire, so silence was not just about avoiding moral discomfort – it was economically essential. The popularity of parlor games developed in lockstep with this embargo on speaking. Games allowed people to play the unsayable.
In ‘Stable Marriage Problem,’ one character practices for the law school entrance exam (LSAT). The exam’s creators claim it tests your ability to understand complex sets of relationships and make deductions based on the given rules. These skills mirror those used to hide power or advantage from others. In calling their eight-bedroom ski house a ‘cabin,’ the two boys appeal to middle-class virtues and tell us we are all the same. It is a tiny gesture, harmless really, but shows us one small way that inequality is hidden, justified, and propagated.
“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.”
“The desire and aspiration to be wealthy is something that we need to interrogate in our culture.”
Little Brother
First exhibited in the 2022 Whitney Biennial, Ellison’s shrewdly destabilizing ‘Little Brother,’ an installment of his ongoing conceptual deep dive into the construction and presentation of white privilege, took as its subject Erik Prince – wealthy heir, former navy SEAL, founder of infamous private military contractor Blackwater, alleged arms trafficker and disinformation operative.
The son of a profoundly conservative Michigan businessman (and younger brother of former US education secretary Betsy DeVos), Prince and his private security groups have reportedly won billions of dollars in government contracts while participating in numerous military and political conflicts around the world.
Ellison imagines Prince, an avatar for the potential lethality of a certain species of moneyed advantage and curdled ambition, as he might have appeared on his sprawling Wyoming ranch in 2003: the year the firm received its first US contracts to engage in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Ellison carefully staged every piece in this project – hiring actors, sourcing props, researching filming locations – and combed through tax filings, transcripts of congressional hearings, military contracting price lists, as well as Prince’s autobiography, in order to create this meticulous portrait.
“The tremendously strange trick of Ellison’s project is the seemingly inexhaustible ambiguity of it all: Even when his images immerse the viewer in placid, well-heeled contentment, they still somehow manage to create profound disquiet, daring us to pry apart their intertwined vibe of Eros and Thanatos.”
Still Life
Much like his highly stylized and arranged mise-en-scenes of upper-class quietude, Ellison’s sequence of lurid still lives — spirals of tangerine peel on a blue background; fennels scattered across pages; tiers of fish and bursts of octopi — are deliberately artificial depictions of the kind of life he was born into, crafted with the precision of commercial shoots.
In this breaking down of boundaries between different rules of photography, Ellison’s work goes beyond a fetishism or repudiation of wealthy habits, in favor of something more ambivalent and uncomfortable. We are compelled to recognize an ostensibly enlightened, progressive bourgeois culture that is restlessly in search of authenticity – a quest lent a decidedly ironic resonance via Ellison’s elaborate artifice.
“Beneath their slick surfaces, Ellison’s photographs are infested with emblems of systemic racism. His scenes of the pampered lifestyle of the American ruling class are designed to leave a bad taste in the mouth.”
Daughters
Originally a way to resolve conflicts between different Native American cultures, lacrosse ended up becoming a rule-bound, middle-class sport played primarily by affluent whites. One reason it has remained an elite sport has been the scarcity of lacrosse rackets, which throughout the history of the sport have been handmade primarily by Native American craftsmen. The indigenous population was then increasingly subjugated, there were fewer and fewer craftsmen in business, fewer rackets were produced and practicing this sport became more and more expensive.
The images in ‘Daughters’ were made during a game between the Hotchkiss and Taft Schools, two boarding schools in Connecticut; Ellison photographed women’s lacrosse because the gameplay is more similar to the Native American version. He chose the two schools with intention: Taft was founded by a member of the Taft political dynasty; Hotchkiss by a beneficiary of the Hotchkiss Arms Company, the manufacturer of the Hotchkiss gun that killed hundreds of the Lakota people during the Massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890.
Although the images emphasize the violence and physicality of the game – the brutality of the maneuvers, the bestial facial expressions – the players remain the products of a sophisticated construct. In nearly invisible ways, their membership in the ranks of the elite has been assured through such rituals, with access barred to outsiders.
“It’s a beautiful sport to watch, but also has this ghostly quality to it, you can’t help but see the shadow of an indigenous population vanished through extermination. It’s one of the few Native American rituals that has a presence in contemporary American life, and, more specifically (and perversely), wealthy, white American life.”
Tender Option
Ellison’s exhibition, ‘Tender Option’ at London gallery The Sunday Painter, examines how ideas of normality and the ‘beautiful idea, perverted mythology’ of the American Dream have become inextricably enmeshed with WASP (White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant) aesthetics.
‘Tender Option’ introduces new work that imagines the early family life of a real person: US Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who along with her siblings is the beneficiary of billions of dollars and incomprehensible tax arrangements. While DeVos was Trump’s controversial pick for secretary of education, her brother, Erik Prince, founded the notorious private mercenary company Blackwater. 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.
Ellison’s keen sense of historical accuracy is matched by his artistic license, and he draws much inspiration from Dutch Renaissance paintings. Beneath the refinement of Ellison’s work remains a sense of tension between this presumed respectability and violence. ‘Tender Option’ highlights the luxury and superficiality of the WASP culture, and how easily it can be subverted and parodied with just a few actors.
“It seems like Dutch artists were negotiating some of the same questions that I have. They were trying to find a visual language that could keep pace with the new treasures flooding into the republic from the colonies.”
Portraits
Rather than point fingers at individuals, Ellison examines the manners, gestures, and behaviors that perpetuate inequality. With such a concerted effort to be as modest or inoffensive as possible, a certain segment of white America seems very invested in covering its tracks. Because the challenge of representing this self-erasing subject fascinates him, Ellison 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.
In this way, Ellison magnifies the immensity of who and what is not portrayed but imaginably resides just down the hill from the staged, skylit kitchens and rosebush-lined driveways where his sun-basked actors roleplay the lives of the blissfully preoccupied leisure set. In their exclusion, the circumstances of the lives just outside of frame somehow become more present, enveloping the smug smiles, radiant flowers, and light-drenched interiors in an unsettling pall.
“My subject seems to very actively resist its own depiction. In a society that’s formally democratic and egalitarian, no one wants to show you the mechanisms that preserve inequality.”
“We live in this over-photographed world, yet there is a whole class of people, the ultra-wealthy, who, for the most part, disclose only what they want.”
Editorial
Ellison’s work examining the codes around wealth and the contemporary face of American elitism have been profiled in publications including Aperture, ArtForum, L’Uomo Vogue, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and W.
“His photographs show us the smiling face of America’s steadfastly enduring structural inequality, an inequality mirrored even in the putatively self-critical structure of its artworld.”
Advertising
Ellison’s immaculately composed and staged still lifes, portraits and stylized narrative pictures of people in elite, banal-seeming scenarios have served as the conduit for advertising campaigns for brands including Balenciaga, Martine Rose x Tommy Hilfiger, Nike, and Courrèges. With an acute knowledge of the monotonous aspirations of the middle class and using the inner vocabulary of privilege, he takes a critical look at American ‘whiteness’ infused with humor and cynicism.
Exhibitions
Ellison’s highly stylized images have been exhibited at The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, The Huntington, Pasadena; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; Index Art Foundation, Stockholm; The Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio; Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon, MMK Frankfurt; and The Whitney Museum of American Art. Recent exhibitions include the 16th Lyon Biennial of Contemporary Art, 2022; Whitney Biennial 2022, Whitney Museum of American Art; Made in L.A. 2020, The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles and The Huntington Libraries and Museum, Pasadena, 2021; and Antarctica, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, 2018. His films and photographs are in the permanent collections of the Aïshti Foundation, Beirut; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and The Whitney Museum of American Art.
“Ellison’s photographs draw attention to the issues of normalization, cultural appropriation, and white-washing.”
Publications
Ellison’s first monograph, ‘Living Trust,’ published by Loose Joints, won the Paris Photo-Aperture Best PhotoBook Award 2020.
Many images in ‘Living Trust’ use a recipe of carefully constructed scenarios to question how photography perpetuates these distinctions. Ellison pays actors and models throughout his work to stand in and take on the appearance of generic characters, at times reminiscent of commercial or advertising tropes. In this breaking down of boundaries between different rules of photography, Ellison’s work goes beyond a fetishism or repudiation of wealthy habits, in favor of something more ambivalent and uncomfortable. Through webs of association stretching across various photographic styles, Living Trust is an anthropology of W.A.S.P. America – where the quest for authenticity and well-being is aestheticised, internalized and commodified.
Ellison will release a monograph with Idea Books, London in 2024.
Film
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