from the archives

Excerpt from OSMOS Issue 16

DARREL ELLIS

BY DREW SAWYER

Shortly after embarking on a career as an artist in the early 1980s, having already earned his credentials at Cooper Union and the Whitney Independent Study Program, Darrel Ellis discovered a trove of his father’s photographs. It was transformational, both personally and artistically. Thomas Ellis, who briefly ran a portrait studio in Harlem, had died brutally in the hands of police a month before Darrel was born in 1958. His snapshots of family and friends in Harlem and the Bronx during the 1950s provided Darrel not only with a window into the life of a man and a family that he never knew, but also source material and inspiration for his art.

Many of the original black-and-white images have a striking affinity to Roy DeCarava’s iconic photographs of life in Harlem during that same decade. Both photographers captured seemingly mundane and specific yet poignant and universal moments: a man lovingly embracing his wife or child, friends reclining on a sofa at a party, a family gathered on the grassy ground in a park.

Over the next decade, Ellis transformed his father’s photographs into a unique body of work across multiple media. He first faithfully translated them into black-and-white drawings and paintings. Eventually, he felt comfortable enough to manipulate and rephotograph the prints directly, an approach so many artists were employing during the 1980s. Witnessing his interest in the material, Ellis’s mother provided him with his father’s negatives, which he began projecting onto three-dimensional plaster forms. In some cases, he even converted his own photographic manipulations into other media, like charcoal and watercolor on paper. The various distortions to the image from these processes inevitably evoke the artist’s troubled biography.

Ellis’s interventions on his father’s photographs may have been a therapy of sorts, but they were also a way to engage with larger topics. Reflecting on his interest in family, Ellis noted:

“It’s no coincidence that I’ve chosen my family as a subject. It does relate to the broader issues of the day. I can’t help but see parallels when I look at those distorted pictures of a black family. In a way, or course, all families have the disruption of this lack of unity, holes, as it were. But the black family is such a big issue today, and in a way there is no black family anymore. And that’s part of my reverie; I grew up with that. When I look at those photographs sometimes, all I see is holes.”

The family was indeed a pressing matter for many artists in the United States during the 1980s. By the end of the decade, the theme was so prevalent that the Museum of Modern Art organized “Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort,” a survey exhibition of contemporary photo- graphic work since 1980 that explored family and home.

Among the artists included was Carrie Mae Weems, whose earliest series, “Family Pictures and Stories” (1978–84), is made up of snapshot-like photographs and audio recordings of her extended family that was in part a reaction to the 1965 government-issued Moynihan report that had cited family instability as the cause of the “deterioration” of African-American life. While Ellis’s father’s photographs from the 1950s may have shown an “ideal black family life” that was “upbeat and kind of opulent,” his manipulations literally fracture and disrupt such an ideal. Referring to his own experience of the dissolution of family life due to his father’s death, Ellis said, “My father’s photos are the raw material I need to talk about the fact that it’s gone.”

Photography and the act of reclaiming images became increasingly important to Ellis and his art throughout the 1980s. He regularly posed for photographers such as Allen Frame, Peter Hujar, and Robert Mapplethorpe, and eventually began using these portraits as the source material for his own paintings and drawings. In 1989, after he was diagnosed with HIV, Nan Goldin invited him to produce work in response to the AIDS crisis for the exhibition “Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing” at New York’s Artists Space. Self-Portrait After Mapplethorpe Photograph became one of the most widely published images from the exhibition, which sparked controversy when the National Endowment for the Arts withdraw a grant due to the politically charged nature of the exhibit and its catalogue.

Darrel Ellis’s life, like his father’s, was tragically cut short. He died of AIDS in 1992, at the age of thirty-four—just as he was beginning to receive wider recognition for his talents. Since then, Frame has helped to make sure that Ellis’s legacy lives on. A few months after Ellis’s death, Frame helped place a selection of photographs in the “New Photography 8” exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, where Ellis had worked as a security guard. In 1996, Frame also organized a solo exhibition and book for Art in General. Now, more than twenty years later, Ellis’s story and art seem more timely than ever.