Their beer-like, blue-blooded inhibition hangs in the twilight of the periwinkle. The photo shows the two DeVos brothers, scions of Amway’s multilevel marketing empire, playing a round of golf with their father. Two men crouch over a short putt. One drinks a can of low-cal Michelob Ultra. The third stands behind them, his stance strong, his back to the camera and us, as he drains his bladder in a stream as straight as a titanium shaft. They seem firm and self-possessed, in the flower of youth. And the fourth figure, the caddy saddled with the golf bag in the Everglades heat – who is he? He is everyone. He wants to be them, and maybe if he pulls on his boots hard enough, he will be.
Buck Ellison’s preppy tableau, “Dick, Dan, Doug, The Everglades Club, Palm Beach, Florida, 1990,” from 2019, seems unlikely — not because scenes like this don’t appear on the links every day, but because the rich and powerful, rarely revealing themselves to the lens. That is why the photo, like many of Ellison’s portraits, is staged. But his sets and actors unfold the push and pull of his subjects in a way that real portraits never could. Their raw use of other people, their informal approach to the landscape. Their carriage as if the whole world lived like them. Their shying away from control.
“I was moved,” Ellison said during an interview in Los Angeles, “the idea that these myths of capturing or exposing ‘one’s inner life through photography can have a use,’ because there is a very powerful group of people who does not allow himself to be photographed.” Finally, he thought, in a world where a billion photos are taken every day, this is something photography is still good for.
“We have all these cartoons of rich people in our culture,” he said. Base class critiques often emphasize rousing but minor misdeeds, like flying private jets or dining at the French Laundry during a coronavirus wave. But “to say that someone inhabits privileges wrongly implies that you could inhabit it correctly.”
As conversations about race, racism and inequality permeate the mainstream, Ellison remains one of the few artists to portray the myths of white male power from within its walls. His contributions to the 2022 Whitney Biennale, on display through September 5 — three fanciful portraits of Erik Prince, the financier and founder of the private security firm Blackwater — show a powerful white man at ease between rooms full of work focused on abstraction and alterity. (Indeed, they do ask the pointed question of what “alterity” would mean in a just world.) In 2019, Daniel C. Blight, a photography lecturer at the University of Brighton, included Ellison in his book “The Image of Whiteness,” and used one of his photos on the cover.Living Trust, the artist’s first monograph, won Aperture’s Best First PhotoBook award in 2020. His work was a highlight of the Made in LA biennale that same year.Ellison will participate in September the Lyon Biennale.
“White people are ghosts,” Blight wrote of Ellison’s work, “invisible to themselves.” And before more accurate, illuminating images of whiteness can circulate, they must be created.
Winning handsome, athletically built, it’s easy to imagine Ellison as one of his subjects. Our conversation started at a wine bar in Silver Lake. Over a glass of Vinho Verde, he noted that he has enough knowledge of social codes to arrange a photo shoot of someone urinating on the green of a country club. (One concession: The “urine” is green tea.) If you have to point a finger, Ellison says, point it first. “I’m part of this problem and taking advantage of these systems,” he says.
Ellison, now 34, grew up among one percent Democrats in Marin County, California, an environment where, he says, an oil heiress could protest the US invasion of Iraq without seeing the irony. His mother is an interior designer. “My father owns thrift stores and rag export businesses,” he says. “This is the family business. My great-grandmother, Stella, apparently coined the word ‘thrift store’ to appeal to Protestant virtues for selling used clothes.”
He attended Marin Academy, a private school in San Rafael, and then studied art and German literature at Columbia University. Coming out as gay set him apart somewhat. Studying photography at the Städelschule in Frankfurt gave him a critical distance from his native country. It also sharpened his conviction to focus on the contemporary face of American elitism. That face—Democrat or Republican, East Coast or West, new money or old—is just as pale in color as the founding fathers.
“What can a privileged white man like Ellison contribute to the necessary conversations in the art world about racism and representation?” says Jim Ganz, the senior curator of photos at the Getty Museum. “It’s a tough question, but a fair one.” Whatever his intentions, as Ganz puts it, the artist ‘exploits his own privilege’. It is – and should be – an inconvenient proposition. But Ellison’s blend of sympathy and penance sets him apart from portraitists of the ultra-wealthy, such as Lauren Greenfield or Tina Barney, whose access depends on good manners. “Under their smooth surfaces, Ellison’s photos are ravaged by emblems of systemic racism,” Ganz continues. His “scenes of the pampered lifestyle of the American ruling class” [are] designed to leave a bad taste in the mouth.”
Ellison’s early photos appreciate the insignia of white prosperity, such as the riding crop in the corner of “Untitled (Whip),” 2011, or the blonde’s blasé poise in “Hilda,” 2014. A 2013 series captures fresh seafood in a Berlin restaurant, beautifully arranged on chipped ice. As with Dutch memento mori, this too is vanity: after he took his pictures, the fish were discarded and doused with bleach to deter scavengers. Gradually, Ellison went in search of the deeper realism of fiction. The kitchens in Ellison’s staged interiors, where two pretty girls pick bell peppers or tight men roll whole-wheat pasta by hand, are airy, cool, and composed. These could be stock photos if they weren’t drenched in reality: the housekeeper behind the girls, the cook’s bare cheeks behind his apron strings. “They fail as stock photos,” says Ellison. “They fail like pharmaceutical ads, they fail like family snapshots. What you have left is art.” The lie that tells the truth.
In 2017, Ellison sent out Christmas cards. The family in the front — comfy, smiling — wasn’t his, but the DeVoses, their photo plucked from the internet. “Merry Christmas,” the caption read, “From our family to yours. Dick and Betsy.”
Donald Trump wallowed in the spotlight, but Ellison turned to that brokering behind the scenes. The artist’s broad interest in the hegemony of the United States ended up with the Prince clan. Not only was Betsy DeVos (née Prince) the new Minister of Education; not only had her father-in-law, Richard DeVos, pioneered the quintessential American practice of multilevel marketing; but her brother, Erik Prince, a former Navy SEAL, had founded the infamous Blackwater security group in 1997. Four Blackwater guards were convicted of murder after a massacre at a market in Baghdad, after which President Trump was pardoned. Here was real power—evangelical, inexplicable—the kind that didn’t have to boast.
Ellison’s take on their 2019 family portrait, “The Prince Children, Holland, Michigan, 1975,” shows the four princes in a living room. As in a Flemish painting, no detail goes unnoticed: a pearl. An eagle flower. Especially the objects near Erik are ominous. Ellison holds three brightly bound books by Abraham Kuyper, the Dutch prime minister and Christian theologian of the early 1800s, over his shoulder. His wrist drapes over an army exercise manual by Baron von Steuben, an 18th-century Prussian officer – one of the young Prince’s favorite books. The harbinger is Ellison’s. As children, the princes are innocent.
By treating a specific family, his work could provide leverage against the temptation of sycofancy or lifestyle porn. Created in LA 2020, the Hammer Museum, founded by an oil company CEO, and the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens included the former Pasadena staple of a railroad baron. Ellison posted a photo of young women playing lacrosse in the Huntington Galleries; in a nearby period room, next to John Singleton Copley’s 1783 dynastic portrait ‘The Western Brothers’, he hung ‘Untitled (Cufflinks)’, 2020: a still life of fresh tennis balls, rejected applications for marriage announcement in DailyExpertNews, a book opened for a painting of aristocratic youth. Here, says Rita Gonzalez, contemporary art director at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, he had drawn a line from past wealth to present-day wealth. “The projected fantasies of belonging, from the Huntington clan to the subjects of Ellison’s photographs, hit me hard.”
Lauren Mackler, curator of Made in LA2020, recalls giving tours of the show. “Upper-class white viewers would immediately react to Buck’s images,” she said. “They often laughed at their humor and spent time unpacking the symbols, titles and landscapes that looked familiar. That said, I don’t think Buck’s work is particularly sympathetic to the subjects.” With an endless supply of similar white actors, “he emphasizes the genericity and substitutability of the characters in the images; their meaninglessness.”
Ellison’s photos contributed to Whitney Biennial’s diffuse aggression in Ken-doll erotica. The portraits depict Erik, 34 years old — Ellison’s age when he photographed them — on his Wyoming ranch. It is November 2003 and the US government has just awarded Blackwater its first contracts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Played to the extreme by Noah Grant, he indulges in groundbreaking role-playing: sighting a gun; shirtless in a barn flanked by pictures of thoroughbreds; coquettishly lounging on the rug, his finger in a Clausewitz book.
The problem then: It’s ugly to say, but the rich aren’t all scapegoats for their wealth. It’s hard, but important, to admit the ways they reflect our values—the ways we detest them, but want them to be. For Ellison, portraying a complex person like Erik Prince means embracing the tension between “wanting to look and feeling bad for watching.” To us, Ellison’s portraits of the progeny of white hegemony hold a similar, terrible sensation.
So far he has received no response from Prince – or any of his subjects – although he has consulted lawyers just in case. “If I portrayed a public figure in a particularly crude or brutal way, it could be grounds for a lawsuit,” he says, “but that’s of no interest to me as an artist. Tenderness has always been the strategy here, not to forgive or to forgive, but to bring me closer to the truth.”