April 11, 2022 |
Glancing at the artwork Untitled (Cufflinks) (2020) by Buck Ellison, your eyes dart from object to object. Fresh-from-the-can tennis balls roll around the frame, strewn amongst New York Times marriage announcement submissions. In the centre, a rumpled pair of shorts still hold the heat of the body that tossed them.
While an open book presents a painting of two young brothers in the Enlightenment era; one innocently nuzzles as the other pokes the torn lining of a hat with a stick – he is playful but wilfully determined. Almost hidden are the eponymous cufflinks; one lies on the shorts, the other on an open page of the book; hand-embroidered, they take on a totemic role. Against the tasteful duck-egg-blue background, staggering the soft pink blush roses, each carefully placed object acts as a signifier of the closeted wealth Ellison explores.
His work carves a small and seductive chink in the armour of the white people that dominate American society. This allows a glance at WASP dynasties, their affluent homes, the sports that define their lives and the institutions that uphold their dominance. In his book Living Trust, released last year, he provides an almost anthropological investigation into the ways whiteness and privilege are recapitulated and broadcast. MoMA’s associate curator of photography Oluremi Onabanjo said the book “focuses really well on what many take for granted… [it makes] visible the silent violence and security of whiteness as it is continually maintained”. Also questioning traditional ideas of masculinity and femininity, Ellison does so from his position as a white American man. Is his intention to criticise? No, he explains, he wants to examine the manners, gestures and behaviours that perpetuate white silence. Ellison is wary of criticism. It often goes hand in hand with advantage or is the product of an expensive, privileged education. “The danger,” Ellison says, “[is that] I could use it to shore up a deservedness of my class position and place myself outside of the problem of systemic racism and inequality. And that’s not structurally possible for me as a white man. Instead, I try to focus on accuracy and precision in my work.”
Dick and Betsy, The Ritz-Carlton, Dallas, Texas, 1984, 2019
Therefore, he is wary of criticism, as although his background has enabled him with a proximity to make this work, an expensive elite education could also be used as a way to wriggle his way out of his place in the problems of systemic racism and inequality. Instead, the work is bound in a desire to be accurate and precise. The resulting images don’t mock and there is no irony deployed; the people who appear in place and space are serious. Ellison’s lens squarely confronts them, as if he is as inquisitive as the viewer in his aim to understand a section of society that so often evades scrutiny. Upon first glance you might think that the people that feature are from the affluent world he presents but, in Ellison’s large-scale images, they are mere stand-ins. Upon further investigation, things are not what they seem.
An avid researcher when he was a child, Ellison had aspirations to become a spy. His process is methodical and rigorous; to every shoot, he brings his ‘Gesture Archive’, a thick wad of printouts mostly of paintings, held together by an industrial silver bulldog clip, which he uses to inform how he positions his sitters. It is all built around his intent to reveal: “The challenge of representing a self-erasing subject fascinates me, so I’ve turned to staging to make them visible, borrowing from the model of a commercial photoshoot – sourcing actors, locations, clothing, props.” In the image Mama, a woman sits on a cream sofa wearing a sandy, beige-coloured jacket over a lighter beige polo neck, which cuts just right atop a pair of caramel wool trousers; her legs are crossed, her hair is side-parted and tied back. Brown eyeshadow carefully lines her deep eyelids and her fingernails are a manicured ‘nude’ colour. Speaking to a younger male figure in the foreground, perhaps her son, whose head is lowered as he studies his hands, we see clothing hanging on a rack in the background, giving the impression that it’s staged in a luxury boutique. Ellison says that clothing and props “are particularly important because they suggest a series of painstaking decisions that preceded the moment in the frame. In the context I’m examining, small details, like hats or bumper stickers, can imply a larger (economic) backstory for the character, so that’s useful.”
Mama, 2016
Born in San Francisco in 1987, Buck Ellison grew up in Marin County, one of the wealthiest places in America. He went to Marin Academy, a private college preparatory school in San Rafael. Described on its website as a “forward-looking school”, the students are encouraged “to explore complex ideas and diverse perspectives, to test their values and judgments, to make their own discoveries”. In writing about Ellison’s work for the magazine Numéro Art, his former classmate Peter Denny recalled “When looking at Buck’s work, it’s hard for me not to recall the girl who opted for a used Subaru when she was offered any car in the world; the gaggle of white boys in Bob Marley T-shirts arguing about whose gas-station sunglasses were cheaper; the summer programs where families paid $20,000 to send their teen on community service in Bali…” These attempts to obscure wealth only fuelled Ellison’s curiosity into the ways it was still visible.
Ellison’s lived experience informs much of his work, notably the image Sunset (2015), where two young men kneel on the ground to gingerly affix a Patagonia sticker to the bumper of a BMW. About the work, Ellison said it is “a literal construction of identity”. Within the homogeneity of high school, each student is vying for individuality, whereby the bumper sticker becomes a proxy for their values. The sticker is not the only signifier; cupping marks are visible on one of the young men’s shoulders and the act of gluing a sticker on a car implies they own it. If you look again, you can also see a ‘Free Tibet’ sticker, juxtaposing left-leaning politics with an expensive car. Another body of work documents professionally maintained organic vegetable gardens in college prep schools in the Bay Area. The foods grown there are not common vegetables but restaurant quality, with hard-to-pronounce names. When speaking about the work, Ellison makes a connection to Marie Antoinette’s mock farm, Hameau de la Reine – bringing into focus the fact that the students are not the only ones maintaining these gardens. In a conversation with the sociologist Shamus Khan, organised by L.A.’s Hammer Museum, which hosts contemporary art, Ellison said he wouldn’t be able to make this work if he had not been raised in this context.
Untitled (Christmas Card #2), 2017
After high school, Ellison studied German literature at Columbia University and went on to do an MFA at Städelschule art school in Frankfurt. Whilst studying, he took to reading novels to inform his work: “It felt like there were more writers who focused on social codes and customs than artists. Jane Austen, Edith Wharton and Virginia Woolf… I hoped that their prose might rub off on me, that I could learn how to do this visually.”
Much like these novelists based characters loosely on real people, Ellison works with commercial casting agencies and, in the main, his subjects are anonymous. The only exception is Tender Option, a series that centres on the Prince-DeVos family, posed by models. Explaining why he used them as a focus, he said, “In 2016, when Betsy DeVos became U.S. Secretary of Education, she was required to publicly disclose her financial holdings. The Wall Street Journal reported on how rare this was, calling the 108-page PDF an ‘unprecedented look at how a super-wealthy family structured its assets, philanthropy, and political donations.’” He says that the “work was based on rigorous research about her family, but its themes – a political shadow state funded by the super-wealthy, a garbling of Christian values to support hate, a fortune built on the debt and desperation of others – are unfortunately global.”
Sierra, Gymnastics Routine, 2015
In one of the images from this series, called Dick and Betsy, The Ritz-Carlton, Dallas, Texas, 1984, Betsy seems to be irritated, as she talks on phone. In 1984, she was a delegate of the Michigan Republican Party and Ellison imagined her canvassing. Pregnant, her belly protrudes into a tight garish hot pink, blue and green flower-printed Lilly Pulitzer dress. Ellison’s Betsy also has spray-tanned legs, a detail he noticed when going through press images of her. The series takes its name from a financial instrument, as Ellison told AnOther magazine, “many of these financial terms also have this strong emotional component… These words we associate almost with love; like ‘trust’ or ‘bonds’ or ‘shares’.” The work hinges on these polarities: the stark, frigid world of financial jargon and the social nature within us all – no matter who we are.
The oddity of Ellison’s images is their in-plain-sight nature. They are not aspirational or cartoonish; they are complex, offering a nuanced look at the wealthy elite. At their depths, they hold a mirror up to the fragility of the American dream. Khan noted that the object in Ellison’s images is whiteness itself; it becomes the thing of scrutiny and analysis, which for so long has gone unchecked. To return to Untitled (Cufflinks) and the painting of the two brothers that features in the open book, Ellison shared that the father had made a fortune in Jamaica and commissioned the portrait upon his return. It is unclear how he made the wealth, but one can assume it was linked to the Triangular Trade, i.e. the slave trade, of the eighteenth century. The childhood that these children can enjoy, the innocence and beauty, is because of extraction and hidden brutality. When the painting is re-contextualised in Ellison’s still life, the stick prodding at the lining of the hat ripples the idyllic surface – reminding us to look beneath it.
Top image: Untitled (Christmas Card #6), 2017, photography by Buck Ellison. Taken from 10+ Issue 4 – BACK TO LIFE – out now. Order your copy here.
Hotchkiss v. Taft #2, 2017
Pasta Night, 2016
