Photographer Tealia Ellis Ritter’s first monograph The Model Family mines the ambiguities of memory through thirty years of observation and recording her own family with unflinching detail.
Death, birth, conflict, divorce and sexuality are framed matter-of-factly alongside those things we might associate with conventional, aspirational nuclear normality: pets, marriage, smiling faces, deep summer evenings.
Exploring intergenerational love, loss, trauma and joy, The Model Family loops and deconstructs family photographs of the past and Ritter's own contemporary images, in the process confronting head-on the ambiguity of photography and its role in memory and identity.
Oscillating between the past and the present, yet not nostalgic, Ritter indicates how the images of those closest to you are also often the most slippery, sliding just out of reach.