Tealia Ellis Ritter – Things We Burned

Things We Burned, vacillates between our desire for preservation and our innate tendency towards destruction. The images operate as a ‘chapter’ in an ongoing archive of photographs of my family that as a whole present an intimate look at a small group of players engaged in a shared drama and examine the basic components of birth, life, death, becoming and unbecoming, togetherness and separation. The banal and the tender are all equally valued as subjects. An intentional see-sawing of emotional states occur within Things We Burned, as the subject matter alternates between day to day events and more emotionally fraught moments, eventually culminating in the burning of a series of personal items and known destruction for reasons left to the viewer to question.

Tealia Ellis Ritter lives and works in rural Connecticut. Ellis Ritter’s work contends with the intersecting roles of the photograph as a personal document, a familial marker of time and object with physical surface. Her interests lie in exploring in both a physical and emotional sense the changing nature of intimacy over time. She is presently engaged in a long term project documenting family members in both a representational and abstract manner, with a focus on the physicality and vulnerability of the human body.

Her work has been exhibited internationally, most recently by Aperture, The New Yorker, Ain’t Bad, Women in Photography, The Magenta Foundation, Catherine Edelman Gallery, Taschen NYC, Double V Gallery, France, the Swab Art Fair Barcelona and at Humble Arts “31 Under 31” exhibition. Her work has also appeared in many publications, including The Daily Telegraph, Mouvement Magazine, Stella Magazine, Bloomberg Pursuits Magazine and the Financial Times.