Untitled (Self-Portrait after Museum Guard Photograph)
Ellis was a photographer and painter whose career was tragically cut short by his death from AIDS at the age of 33. Most of his photographic output consists of works he made during a residency at PS1 from 1979 to 1982. In these works he photographed projections on his studio wall of collages he made from found imagery. For many of these works, he used as source material the negatives left behind by his late father, a commercial portrait photographer in the Bronx and Harlem who was killed in an act of police brutality (he was an unconnected bystander in a street crime). This moving work was made using a family snapshot of his sister and mother made in Crotona Park in the Bronx. Here the elements of rupture in collage evoke the trauma of his father's needless death and the wreckage it visited on the family unit.
Artwork Details
- Title: Untitled (Self-Portrait after Museum Guard Photograph)
- Artist: Darrel Ellis (American, New York 1958–1992 New York)
- Date: ca. 1990
- Medium: Gelatin silver print
- Dimensions: Sheet: 7 15/16 × 9 7/8 in. (20.1 × 25.1 cm)
- Classification: Photographs
- Credit Line: Purchase, Vital Projects Fund Inc. Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2019
- Object Number: 2019.286
- Curatorial Department: Photographs
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