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DARREN ELL PHOTOGRAPHY

 * Speaking Out
 * The Southwest Border
 * A Quiet Migration
 * Surviving Refuge
 * Arrivals
 * Double appartenance
 * Between States
 * Palestine
 * Carré rouge : Droit de parole
 * Haiti Holdup
 * Haiti After the Coup
 * Everything is Fine

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CONTACT INFO

Email : elldarren@gmail.com

Mobile : 514 662-9908




DARREN ELL PHOTOGRAPHY

Darren Ell Photography
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SPEAKING OUT

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SPEAKING OUT

Organized popular protest dates back millennia and continues throughout the
world today. Once cynically called “an excess of democracy” in the US, protest
is one of many forms of popular engagement with the issues of the day. Animated
by perceived injustice and a desire for change, effective protest operates on
the visible level (crowds and signs), designed to attract cameras and educate
the public. It also operates on a level where cameras rarely go: meetings,
petitions, educational activities, organizing on social media and so on. Large
scale popular protest inevitably draws a reaction from the authorities, and it
is not always peaceful, as can be seen in some of these images. My passion for
social justice and politics inevitably leads me to the street wherever I am.
While some of these photographs have been taken in the US, Haiti and Greece, my
home city of Montreal with its large diverse immigrant population is often the
site of demonstrations of international solidarity.
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EVERYTHING IS FINE

In the last two decades, I have published and exhibited photographs about the
impact of poverty and military occupation, the struggles of immigrants, refugees
and political prisoners as well as the turmoil of social unrest. Doing this work
as a white Canadian middle class man made me acutely aware of the differences
between my life and the lives of those I photograph. While all human beings
struggle and suffer privately regardless of class, what the camera sees in a
refugee camp or a deeply impoverished neighborhood is different from what it
sees in public middle class life. In order to create images of the latter, I
began photographing public trade shows in Quebec where members of my social
class avail themselves of the latest products and services coming onto the
market. I then continued the work by looking at tourism during my vacations.
Everything is Fine is a work of social documentary and a satire of the middle
class. It uses tourism, leisure and consumerism as subject matter to explore
questions of class, culture, race, inequality, gender stereotypes, distraction,
and taste. It borrows from the language of vernacular photography with its focus
on the banal and commonplace as well as from the language of commercial
photography via the use of flash and saturated colors. The photographs were made
between 2014 and 2023 in Canada, Croatia, Cuba, France, Iceland, Italy, Morocco,
Portugal, Spain, and the United States.
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THE SOUTHWEST BORDER

The southwest border of the United States, akin to a continental socio-economic
fault line, separates two worlds. To the south is Latin America, which for
centuries has borne the brunt of harsh colonial interference. Foreign
intervention and exploitation have deprived many Latin American countries of
regular peaceful transitions of power, something virtually unknown north of the
border in the US and Canada. Social, political and economic upheaval regularly
drive migrants and asylum seekers to the US border in hope of a better life.
Many never survive the quest, falling prey to organized crime or succumbing to
the harsh elements of the borderlands. Since the 1990’s, the southwest border
has become one of the most heavily barricaded borders in the world. NAFTA
planners, knowing their 1994 trade agreement would ruin the livelihoods of
millions of Mexican farmers, proposed a metal border wall to stem the flow of
migrants northward. After 9/11, investment in border control grew exponentially.
Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) and ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement)
now form a security juggernaut in the US. The ever longer and higher border wall
now works in tandem with a “virtual wall” of cutting-edge high-tech surveillance
equipment positioned along the 3,000-km border. The same phenomenon is occurring
elsewhere: the number of border walls in the world has quadrupled since 1990.
And then there is legislation. The Trump Administration, for example, has
proposed or implemented a steady stream of shocking anti-immigrant policies,
most contested in the courts and some eventually abandoned. While the Trump
Administration’s policies are extreme, US immigration practices in previous
decades have left 12 million undocumented immigrants living in fear of
deportation from the US, without access to citizenship or the basic services and
rights enjoyed by US citizens. Mexican border cities from Tijuana to Matamoros
have been flooded with deportees, their lives turned upside down since being
expelled from the country they called home. Over the years, a nation-wide
network of activists, solidarity and legal organizations have fought back,
helping migrants and calling for comprehensive immigration reform. Photographing
policies is of course impossible, but their impact is very visible: landscapes
lined with steel walls and surveillance towers, border police, refugee camps,
water barrels in barren landscapes, graveyards and other signs can be found
throughout the border region. In this project, the story told by the land is
enriched by the testimonials of those caught up in the drama that plays out on
the southwest border every day of the year.
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Montreal, 2021 : Demonstation against the Israeli bombardement of Gaza.

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