Laurence Ellis is a photographer; born in London in 1984, he lives and works in both London and New York.
Ellis studied Social Anthropology before embarking on a career as a photographer, initially assisting Mark Lebon in London. This developed into a long term collaboration, working on several exhibitions together.
Moving back and forth between personal projects and commercial work, Ellis has produced a complex body of photographic and video work, offering a contemporary take on the genre of portraiture. He uses both analogue and digital techniques and enjoys the opportunities for experimentation offered by the darkroom and in post-production.
Over the past 2 years Ellis has worked on several long form photography projects, which include; documenting climate change refugees in the Arctic Circle, Indigenous pipeline protest camps in the Bayous of Lousiana and Northern Canada, alternative mental health communities in rural Scotland and India, and most recently travelling through central/east Africa, South America and Vietnam exploring the importance of Indigenous knowledge in relation to climate change mitigation and sustainability.
Rooted in all of his work is the importance of place and a drive to understand peoples spiritual connection to land. “People seem to be under the impression that they can heal the ill’s of the planet, without any sort of internal healing, we are undoubtably connected and intertwined. In the words of the Wetʼsuwetʼen First Nation Peoples of British Colombia, Heal the People, Heal the Land”
The Ford Foundation Centre for Social Justice, presented a large scale Exhibition of Ellis’s work, in conjunction with the Rainforest Foundation, at the United Nations Climate Action Summit in New York (October 2019). Photographed just weeks before the devastating fires which received global attention, the exhibition aimed to increase awareness around the work of the Indigenous communities in the Tres Fronteras region of the Amazon basin, (where th
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