Biography
Biography
David Ellingsen is a Canadian photographer creating images that speak to the relationship between humans and the natural world. He focuses on themes of climate, deforestation, and biodiversity loss while drawing upon relationship to place.
Intersections form the foundation of Ellingsen’s practice – intersections of observer and participant, documentary photography and contemporary art, archivist and surrealist. He utilizes a wide range of technical means across the projects, motivated by the evolution of the tools of this restless medium.
Ellingsen’s photographs are exhibited internationally and are part of the permanent collections of the Chinese Museum of Photography, South Korea's Datz Museum of Art and Canada's Beaty Biodiversity Museum and Royal British Columbia Museum. They have been shortlisted for Photolucida's Critical Mass Book Award, appeared with National Geographic, and awarded First Place at the Prix de la Photographie Paris and the International Photography Awards. In his early years Ellingsen was a freelance assignment photographer, eventually working with clients such as the New York Times Magazine, Business Development Bank of Canada, Canadian Medical Association, Oprah Winfrey Network, People magazine and CBC Radio Canada.
With a practice formed by the landscape he grew up in, Ellingsen lives and works in the Pacific Northwest, moving between his home in Victoria and the island of Cortes, where he was raised, 150 miles to the north. Since arriving as that island’s first immigrant settlers in 1887, his family has continued residence on these traditional, unceded territories of the Klahoose, Tla’amin and Homalco First Nations.