Tealia Ellis Ritter’s first monograph, The Model Family, explores intergenerational love, loss, trauma and joy through thirty years of the artist photographing her family. The book loops and deconstructs family photographs of the past alongside her own contemporary images, confronting the ambiguity of photography and its role in memory and identity.
Far from a space of nostalgia, The Model Family examines family dynamics with unflinching detail. Death, birth, conflict, divorce and sexuality mix matter-of-factly with conventional, aspirational domestic subjects: pets, marriage, smiling faces, deep summer evenings. In Ritter’s circular conception of the family, oscillating imperceptibly between past and present, she considers how images of those closest to you are often the most slippery, sliding just out of reach.
The book is published by Loose Joints, designed by the same, with text by Lisa Taddeo and editing by Sarah Chaplin Espenon. It runs 172 pages at 200 x 250 mm and contains 140 photographs, presented as a debossed OTA-bound sewn softcover with tip-in and flaps. It appeared in January 2022, ISBN 978-1-912719-33-4.
Tealia Ellis Ritter (b. 1978) is an American artist living and working in rural Connecticut. Her work has been exhibited internationally, most recently by Aperture, Taschen NYC, the Swab Art Fair, Barcelona and as part of Designing Women III: MOTHER, and has appeared in publications including The New Yorker, i-D and The Financial Times.
