The Model Family
Anne with the last of her pigeons, 2017 © Tealia Ellis Ritter
Intergenerational love, loss, trauma and joy are explored through a project mining the ambiguities of memory, through thirty years of the artist photographing her family.
Ellis Ritter’s first monograph The Model Family loops and deconstructs family photographs of the past and her own contemporary images, in the process confronting head-on the ambiguity of photography and its role in memory and identity. However, far from being a space of nostalgia, The Model Family explores family dynamics with unflinching detail: death, birth, conflict, divorce and sexuality mix matter-of-factly alongside conventional, aspirational nuclear normality: pets, marriage, smiling faces, deep summer evenings. In Ellis Ritter’s circular conception of the family, imperceptibly oscillating between the past and the present, the artist explores how the images of those closest to you are also often the most slippery, sliding just out of reach.
The Model Family, Tealia Ellis Ritter
Text by Lisa Taddeo
Loose Joints, 2022
Debossed OTA-bound sewn softcover with tip-in and flaps
20 x 25 cm, 172 pages
Crystal with pet snake 1999/2019 © Tealia Ellis Ritter
Crystal with flower crown 1993/2019 © Tealia Ellis Ritter