Buck Ellison’s shrewdly destablizing “Little Brother,” the most recent installment of his ongoing conceptual deep dive into the construction and presentation of white privilege, took as its subject Erik Prince—wealthy heir, former navy SEAL, founder of infamous private military contractor Blackwater, alleged arms trafficker and disinformation operative. The son of a profoundly conservative Michigan businessman (and younger brother of former US education secretary Betsy DeVos), Prince and his private security groups have reportedly won billions of dollars in government contracts while participating in numerous military and political conflicts around the world.
For the Los Angeles–based Ellison, a photographer with a keen eye for telling details and the obsessive stamina to painstakingly bring them to life, Prince is an avatar for the potential lethality of a certain species of moneyed advantage and curdled ambition. But he’s also something of a charismatic all-American hottie, at least as imagined in Ellison’s first major gallery show in New York, which included six meticulously staged photos, a short film, and a wallpaper piece evoking the Opium Wars–era colonial project of the British East India Company. Set in 2003, when Prince was thirty-four and Blackwater was winning its first major contracts, Ellison’s images feature actor Noah Grant playing the nefarious figure doing, well, nothing much really, on his family’s 990-acre Wyoming ranch. At first glance, the activities depicted in the photos—Prince looks at documents on the porch of the estate home, gazes pensively into the distance, walks in a moonlit pasture—are so banal they hardly even register. This guy is the wicked mastermind of the martial dark arts? Puppet master of deadly mercenary forces, covert CIA asset, associate of militia leaders and warlords across the globe? But there’s method to Ellison’s mundanity: As he writes in a publication that explicates the project, “I wanted . . . to earnestly try to understand someone whose actions make my stomach turn—where he came from, which institutions molded him, which hardships marred him.” The project’s motivation, he has said, is to examine “what happens when a viewer is forced to get close to a snake in the grass. If the camera allows us to desire, or to be curious, or to feel empathy.”
A trio of photos from “Little Brother” were included in last year’s Whitney Biennial, introducing the most focused to date of Ellison’s explorations from the past half-dozen or so years of the habits and habitats of affluent white Americans. On the golf course and in the hipster housewares shop, gathered around plates of crudités or rumbling pasta machines in marble-clad kitchens, his carefully cast and staged actors appear perfectly born to the manner of their Lilly Pulitzer and Patagonia. The tremendously strange trick of Ellison’s project is the seemingly inexhaustible ambiguity of it all: Even when his images immerse the viewer in placid, well-heeled contentment, they still somehow manage to create profound disquiet, daring us to pry apart their intertwined vibe of Eros and Thanatos.
In some ways, Ellison has set himself a more difficult task than usual with Prince. Typically dressed like a field hand in these images, his subject lacks some of the more obvious symbols of station that mark his milieu. Yet the photos—each given a title that mashes up an evocative time stamp with snippets of bureaucratic language from Prince’s tax forms, Blackwater documents, and details from his 2014 autobiography, Civilian Warriors—are bursting with obscure but decisive signifiers of his particular clan. Thus, in Fog, In His Light We Shall See the Light, Raintree 23 Ltd Ptnr, Excess Distribution Carryover, if Any, 2003, 2021, we get Prince, stripped to the waist like your basic bro, in front of a wall bearing photos 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 related to some sort of centrifuge. And in Rain in Rifle Season, Distributions from Split-Interest Trusts, Price Includes Uniform, Never Hit Soft, 2003, 2021, our man lounges on a richly tufted Persian rug wearing a denim shirt emblazoned with the logo of an obscure but massive defense technology firm, his finger tucked into one of his favorite books, Carl von Clausewitz’s On War—chillaxing with the early-nineteenth-century Prussian strategist’s famous notion of military violence as a continuation of politics by other means.
