Buck Ellison’s first monograph, Living Trust, brings together sixty colour plates made between staged settings and performative interventions in the language of photography. Los Angeles–based Ellison works with actors and models who assume the appearance of generic characters, often recalling commercial and advertising tropes. The surface is deliberately mild: organic vegetables, wellness therapies, performance sportswear, lacrosse and rowing, family Christmas card portraits. Underneath lies a sustained inquiry into how whiteness and privilege are maintained and broadcast—through diet, bumper stickers, the health problems one can afford to worry about, the quality of air one breathes.

The book’s method is not exposure but entanglement. By constructing scenarios and crossing photographic registers, Ellison refuses both fetishism and easy repudiation of wealthy habits; the result is ambivalent, uncomfortable, and more exact for it. Living Trust reads as an anthropology of W.A.S.P. America, where authenticity and well-being are aestheticised, internalised, commodified. The sequencing and art direction—by Sarah Chaplin Espenon and Loose Joints Studio—give the images the texture of an argument rather than a portfolio.

Lucy Ives, Orit Gat, and Brooke Harrington contribute texts that extend the project’s web of associations. The clothbound embossed hardcover, 132 pages at 25 × 32 cm, is a considered object: large enough for the pictures’ social detail, restrained enough to keep the tone cool. Living Trust received the Paris Photo–Aperture First PhotoBook of the Year Award in 2020, a recognition that confirms its standing among recent photobooks.

For collectors, the book matters less as a trophy than as a coherent early statement by an artist whose subject is the visual grammar of class. Its combination of staged production, critical distance, and collaborative authorship makes it a durable point of reference for anyone following contemporary photography’s engagement with privilege and its images.