Darren Ell Photography

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.

The Age of Innocence 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 nine countries: Canada, Croatia, Cuba, Iceland, Italy, Morocco, Portugal, Spain, and the United States.