What Old Money Looks like in America, and Who Pays for It

It’s the cut of the jacket that’s the dead giveaway. The graceful arc it draws above the woman’s waistline looks architecturally engineered, its hourglass effect enhanced by tastefully wide peaked lapels. The fabric, too, looks sumptuous. Cashmere? Probably. There’s nothing flashy about the gray-and-beige-clad subject of Buck Ellison’s “Mama” (2016), with her pulled-back hair and her prim manicure, but she radiates an air of wealth quietly, like the footfall of a Stubbs & Wootton slipper on a plush Persian carpet. No doubt somewhere in the pages of Emily Post’s “Etiquette” it says: new money shouts, old money whispers.

You could say that the lives and tastes of so-called old money—old, that is, in the American sense—are the subject of Ellison’s staged photographic tableaux and cheeky, deadpan still-lifes. The markers we’ve come to associate with a particular brand of buttoned-up, Ivy League, East Coast Waspish wealth are omnipresent. His subjects seem to have stepped out of the pages of a J. Crew catalogue, and look as though they probably have names like Bunny and Tripp. They are white and often blond and are situated among gleaming Land Rovers, rolling golf courses, and pristine marble kitchens. The photographs appear, in other words, to be a part of the robust artistic tradition of depictions of the beneficiaries of fabulous dynastic wealth, with the Vineyard Vines fleece taking the place of baroquely ruffled lace and velvet as a mark of distinction. And they would be, if only his subjects were who they seem to be.

Ellison, who is based in Los Angeles, almost exclusively hires local actors and models to play the ersatz bluebloods who populate his pictures, and he inserts them into rigorously stage-managed scenarios that he devises beforehand. (A notable exception to the rule is the series of photographs he made of a women’s lacrosse game between the tony Connecticut prep schools Taft and Hotchkiss, whose players exude a martial intensity that will no doubt serve them well in the corporate boardrooms and white-shoe law firms of their futures.) This contrivance separates Ellison from other run-of-the-mill society portraitists and life-style photographers, as well as from the upper-crust chronicler Tina Barney, with whom Ellison is often superficially compared. Ellison goads us to contemplate not just the existence of an American ruling class, with its idiosyncratic and easily satirizable mores and style codes, but the invisible lineaments of wealth, power, and race that undergird its existence.

It’s often been pointed out that, in our current socioeconomic landscape, the rich are no longer simply rich. They are preposterously rich, incomprehensibly rich, possibly even catastrophically rich. Thomas Piketty, the famed French economist, made a memorable observation about this state of affairs in his book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” (2014), eerily presaging our paranoid, conspiracy-addled age. “For millions of people,” he wrote, “ ‘wealth’ amounts to little more than a few weeks’ wages in a checking account or low-interest savings account, a car, and a few pieces of furniture. The inescapable reality is this: wealth is so concentrated that a large segment of society is virtually unaware of its existence, so that some people imagine that it belongs to surreal or mysterious entities.”

For Ellison, however, these élite hoarders of wealth are neither surreal nor mysterious. On the contrary, they are part of his milieu. Like Barney, a scion of the Lehman family who married a wealthy New Englander, Ellison hails from the Waspish world that is his subject (though he grew up in the Bay Area, where new money reigns). He looks the part, too: tall and square-jawed, with the bearing of a collegiate rower, and when I interviewed him over Zoom he wore his late grandfather’s sporty steel Rolex. As a teen-ager he came out as gay, which set him far enough apart from his surroundings to give him critical distance. But it didn’t make turning a camera back on his privileged background any easier. “That took a second coming out for me,” he said. In a photo M.F.A. program he attended, at Frankfurt’s famed Städelschule, most students favored more avant-garde subject matter. “I remember being really embarrassed because I was, like, ‘I’m interested in this picture of Range Rovers,’ ” Ellison said.

Truth be told, this embarrassment is a part of his cultural inheritance. In making his pictures, Ellison is in violation of a cardinal rule. It’s the kind of thing that gets you booted off the pages of the Social Register or blackballed by the Colonial Dames of America. This is to say: one simply does not talk about money. When you have it, and you’ve always had it, and the working assumption is that your progeny will have it in perpetuity as well, mentioning money is not just impossibly gauche but carries with it an air of superstition, lest speaking of its existence might summon up questions of whether it’s deserved. Bucking this prohibition, Ellison could be considered something of a class traitor. “It’s so clear to me that one of the main things that perpetuates inequality is our silence around it,” he told me. Ellison’s photos are not always caustic. His approach to his subjects can feel playful and even lightly erotic, as in scenes of a shirtless hunk in “Hiker” (2015) or a bare-assed home chef in “Pasta Night” (2016). But whereas Barney’s works are as harmless as a Ralph Lauren ad, and barbed pictures like Cindy Sherman’s ghoulish “Society Portraits” can be laughed off as caricatures, Ellison captures America’s moneyed and serves them up for public scrutiny on a veritable silver platter, as only one of their own could.

There’s a term that has fallen out of fashion which was once used to describe the consequence-free decadence that afflicts America’s more unruly heirs: “Wasp rot.” Two decades ago, it was used to describe the wayward son George W. Bush, before he failed spectacularly upward into the Oval Office. It’s also a fitting description of the scene in Ellison’s “Dick, Dan, Doug, The Everglades Club, Palm Beach, Florida, 1990” (2019), in which we are shown the title’s alliteratively named bros kitted out in golf gear, two of them reverently contemplating a putt while the third, his back to the camera, insouciantly pisses on the putting green. It’s a small transgression, innocuous really, and yet the picture reeks of the kind of boys-will-be-boys entitlement that is used to excuse the worst excesses of the overly privileged. The work is taken from Ellison’s series of imagined vignettes of the lives of the DeVos family, whose eldest son, the pictured Dick, married Betsy (née Prince), the famously underqualified future Secretary of Education. Of course, what is passed down is not just money, or the keys to luxury automobiles and fine Swiss timepieces. It’s power, too. This tradition benefits a lucky few, but the rot is inherited by us all.

An earlier version of this article included an imprecise description of “Dick, Dan, Doug, The Everglades Club, Palm Beach, Florida, 1990” (2019).