Buck Ellison’s artfully destabilizing “Little Brother,” the latest installment in his deep conceptual dive into the construction and presentation of white privilege, took as its subject Erik Prince, wealthy heir, former Navy SEAL, founder of the infamous military contractor private Blackwater, alleged arms dealer and disinformation agent. The son of a deeply conservative Michigan businessman (and younger brother of former U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos), Prince and his private security groups are said to have won billions of dollars in government contracts while participating in many military and political conflicts around the world.
For Los Angeles-based Ellison, a photographer with a keen eye for telling detail and the obsessive stamina to painstakingly bring it to life, Prince is an avatar of the potential lethality of some species of financial advantage and curdled ambition. But he’s also something of a charismatic American hottie, at least as imagined in Ellison’s first major exhibition in New York, which included six meticulously staged photos, a short film, and wallpaper evoking the colonial project of the Opium War era. the British East India Company. Set in 2003, when Prince was thirty-four and Blackwater was winning his first major contracts, Ellison’s footage features actor Noah Grant playing the infamous character doing, well, not much really, on the his family’s 990-acre ranch in Wyoming. At first glance, the activities depicted in the photos – Prince looking at documents on the porch of the estate house, gazing pensively into the distance, walking in a moonlit pasture – are so mundane that they hardly realize it. account. This guy is the evil mastermind of black martial arts? Puppeteer of murderous mercenary forces, secret agent of the CIA, associate of militia leaders and warlords around the world? But there’s a method to Ellison’s banality: as he writes in a publication that explains the project, “I wanted . . . sincerely trying to understand someone whose actions make my stomach turn – where he came from, what institutions shaped him, what difficulties marred him. The motivation for the project, he said, is to examine “what happens when a viewer is forced to approach a snake in the grass. If the camera allows us to desire, or to be curious, or to feel empathy.
A trio of “Little Brother” photos were included in the Whitney Biennial last year, showcasing Ellison’s most focused explorations to date of the past half-dozen years into the habits and habitats of Affluent white Americans. On the golf course and in the hipster housewares shop, gathered around plates of raw vegetables or rumbling pasta machines in marble-clad kitchens, its carefully cast and staged actors seem perfectly born in the manner of their Lilly Pulitzer and Patagonia. The extremely strange trick of Ellison’s project is the seemingly inexhaustible ambiguity of it all: even when his images plunge the viewer into placid, well-heeled contentment, they still manage to create deep disquiet, challenging us to separate their ambience intertwined with Eros. and Thanatos.
In some ways, Ellison has set himself a tougher task than usual with Prince. Typically dressed as a field man in these images, his subject lacks some of the more obvious station symbols that mark his milieu. Yet the photos – each with a title that mixes an evocative timestamp with snippets of bureaucratic language from Prince’s tax forms, Blackwater documents and details from his 2014 autobiography, Civil warriors– are full of obscure but decisive signifiers of his particular clan. Thus, in Fog, in its light we shall see the light, Raintree 23 Ltd Ptnr, excess distribution carryover, if any, 2003, 2021, we get Prince, shirtless like your stock bro, in front of a wall bearing pictures of his Navy comrades and Blackwater contractors; a cap from Hillsdale College, his conservative Christian alma mater; and a series of Post-it notes with instructions for some kind of juicer. And in Rain in Rifle Season, Distributions from Split-Interest Trusts, Price Includes Uniform, Never Hit Soft, 20032021, our man is lounging on a richly tufted Persian rug wearing a denim shirt emblazoned with the logo of an obscure but massive defense tech company, his finger tucked into one of his favorite books, Carl von Clausewitz On the war— by playing with the famous notion of the early 19th century Prussian strategist that military violence is a continuation of politics by other means.
