LA-based Ellison’s work broadly investigates the language of privilege through meticulously researched images, often executed through staged settings and performative interventions into the visual language of photography. 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 favour of something more ambivalent and uncomfortable.
Like Ellison's carefully-crafted images, the design of Living Trust expropriates visual cues from the language of privilege: from the cover's Oxford-shirt-preppy pink, to the heavily formally structured and chapterised presentation of Ellison's works, or the dark green endpapers: voted consistently 'the colour of wealth'.
Winner of the Paris Photo–Aperture First PhotoBook of the Year Award 2020
Loose Joints Publishing, 2020
132 pages, 60 colour plates, 25 × 32 cm
Clothbound embossed hardcover
Texts by Lucy Ives, Orit Gat and Brooke Harrington
ISBN 978-1-912719-17-4
Book Design, Editing, Production
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