UC Riverside

Looking at the photographic work of Darrel Ellis, I will examine how photographers use personal family photographs as material in their own work and how the afterlives of these materials trouble or inform personal and political identities through a practice of refusal both inside and outside the home. Darrel Ellis was an artist from the South Bronx who, throughout the late 1970’s and 80’s, carried out experimentations using photography, drawing and painting. In 1992 he experienced an untimely death after a battle with AIDS leaving behind a short but rich legacy of work. While involved with a variety of art making practices, this project will focus on the photographic works in which he utilizes family photos taken from his father’s personal collection. His father, Thomas Ellis, was also a photographer who took snapshots and studio portraits of his family and friends and was tragically killed months before Darrel was born. This sets Ellis up for a complicated relationship to both his family history and larger structures of social authority highlighting his positionality as a gay, HIV positive, African American male living in New York. Ellis’s photographic work builds on his father’s photographs and obscures them as a way to explore and understand his personal history as well as trauma. Decolonial frameworks and a practice of refusal will help provide a reconsideration of aesthetics and identity in relation to his father photos, vernacular photography and the afterlives of these images inside the home. Outside the home will provide a space to analyze how these images are then deconstructed and reconstructed as art objects and the processes that are utilized such as repetition, redaction and re-photography.