Biography
David Ellingsen is a Canadian photographer and conservation artist creating images of site-specific installations, landscapes and object studies that speak to the natural world and Man’s impact upon it.
Employing a range of photographic processes across his thematic projects, Ellingsen acts as archivist, surrealist and storyteller as he calls attention to the contemporary state of the environment both directly and through conceptual, subversive commentary about our consumerist society. Ellingsen’s images engage questions around the transience and temporality of existence and his thematic subjects are marked by simplicity, empathy and a wounded sense of humanity’s fate.
Ellingsen began his artistic career studying the craft of photography at a trade institute, through apprenticeships and then working as a freelance editorial and advertising photographer with clients that included the New York Times Magazine, Mens Journal, CBC Radio Canada, Telus and MTV/Nickelodeon. Simultaneously, Ellingsen was exhibiting his personal artwork within public and private galleries in Canada, the USA, and Asia and appearing as a guest speaker and instructor at educational institutions in British Columbia. Ellingsen continued this hybrid path for 12 years and then in 2013 focused fully on his artistic practice.
Ellingsen’s photographs are part of the permanent collections of the Chinese Museum of Photography, South Korea's Datz Museum of Art and Vancouver's Beaty Biodiversity Museum and have been shortlisted for Photolucida's Critical Mass Book Award, awarded First Place at the Prix de la Photographie Paris and First Place at the International Photography Awards in Los Angeles.
Ellingsen lives and makes his work in Canada’s Pacific Northwest, moving between Victoria, Vancouver and the farm where he was raised on the remote island of Cortes.