This exhibition Paradise ǀ Paradise layered of Thomas Sayers Ellis is presented at Florida Museum of Photographic Arts in Tampa, Florida from June 18 to August 4, 2024. The exhibition is curated and produced by St. Petersburg Month of Photography (SPMOP).
Marieke van der Krabbenexecutive director and curator of St. Petersburg Month of Photography, writes:
Writer, poet, conductor, and photographer Thomas Sayers Ellis has lived in St. Petersburg, Florida, for several years after moving from Washington, DC and New York. He is not yet used to the heat but his desire to document the streets and the people overcomes this obstacle. His presence goes unnoticed by most, but occasionally someone remembers that he took his photo earlier. He is open, polite and friendly, qualities that a good street photographer must possess to create the candid images that belong to this genre. However, with his images he creates stories that go beyond street photography. Her images are seductive, they will lure you to paradise. They are conflicting, they will show you the margins that make up your paradise. His images are superimposed, literally and figuratively. They show a different dimension of paradise, a dimension constituted by advertising, marketing and the construction of the image of what paradise should be. But at the same time, this paradise is a construction reserved for a privileged few. The longtime inhabitants of paradise are moved to the margins, out of sight, just out of frame. The fact that these residents are often minorities and low-income echoes Tampa Bay’s long history of segregation and gentrification. With his photographs, Thomas draws attention to the “forgotten” people of this paradise, while juxtaposing the bright and colorful tourist industry with the dark underbelly that makes this industry work. The layers he adds in his photographs create an awareness of things that were once obscured, outside the scope of the famous Florida-themed photographs we all know: dolphins, sunsets and flamingos . It creates an ironic metaphor for the world we currently live in: shiny things, aggressive retorts and promises of paradise blind people to what society has become. Ellis’ photographs show us that things are always what they seem.
(extract of ‘In the hall of mirrors, nothing is as it seems’, de Marieke van der Krabben, Avant-propos de Paradise ǀ Paradise layered)
Thomas Sayers Ellis was born in 1963 in Washington, D.C., where he attended Paul Laurence Dunbar High School, played the timpani, and dreamed of becoming a writer. In 1986 he bought a stolen camera, and in 1987 he took his first memorable photographs at the funeral of novelist and essayist James Baldwin in New York. He co-founded The Dark Room Collective, a literary forum for emerging and established black authors, in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1989, and Heroes Are Gang Leaders, a collection of artists and musicians in 2015, the same year he received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry. In 2018, Heroes Are Gang Leaders received the American Book Award for Oral Literature. While touring with HAGL and the Dead Lecturers, Ellis used his camera in Paris, Berlin, The Hague, Lisbon, Florence, Venice and Gdansk. He is the author of The Maverick Room (2005); Skin, Inc.: Identity Repair Poems (2010); Crank Shaped Notes (2021) and Mexico (2021), a collection of photographs. Her writing has been published in Best American Poetry (1997, 2001, 2010, 2012); The Paris Review; Poetry; The Nation, Tin House, Grand Street and numerous anthologies. His work has been the subject of two solo exhibitions at Studiottantuno in Mantua, Italy, “Manually Forcing All Modes of ReSKINstance Into Fo(lk)cus” (2019) and Fotosincronologie: frammenti di un tempo poetico (2022). Ellis has lived in several American cities, including Boston, Providence, Cleveland, Missoula, New York, Washington, DC, Missoula, Iowa City and San Francisco. In 2016, he moved to Florida where he has quietly compiled an archive of creative and critical images of daily life in Paradise. A recipient of a Creative Pinellas Emerging Artist Grant for photography, he was named St. Petersburg’s first photo winner during St. Petersburg Photography Month 2023.
A book of this exhibition, Ellis’ year as the first Photo Laureate and other of his recent work will be available for purchase.
Thomas Sayers Ellis : Paradise ǀ Paradise layered
June 18 – August 4, 2024
Florida Museum of Photographic Arts
1630 E 7th Ave,
Tampa, FL 33605
www.fmopa.org
Saint Petersburg Month of Photography
https://spmop.org/
