Based in rural Connecticut, photographer Tealia Ellis Ritter has been photographing her immediate family since her early teenage years. Her ongoing series, “The Model Family,” brings together images from her archive, creating a visual representation of the passage of time. Organized into ambiguous “chapters,” the images don’t necessarily follow a cohesive chronological order, mimicking what Ellis Ritter describes as “the circuitous path memory often takes.”  

“A singular image may present multiple meanings in each arrangement, altering its own relationship to the group,” she explains. “Much like a time traveler revisiting the same moment in their own life multiple times, with each visit the specific moment is linked to a new sequence. Kurt Vonnegut in his novel, Slaughterhouse Five, describes looking at one’s life in this manner.  ‘Each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message – describing a situation, a scene….There isn’t any particular relationship between all the messages, except the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep.’”

See more from “The Model Family” below!