The Model Family (Broché)

Intergenerational love, loss, trauma and Joy are explored through a project mining thirty years of the artist photographing her family. Ellis Ritter's first monographs The Model Family loops and deconstructs family photographs of the past and her own contemporary images. In this process, Ellis Ritter confronts 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 unflichinf detail.
Death, birth, conflicts, 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.
With a text by acclaimed writer Lisa Taddeo.