Buck Ellison, Rain in Rifle Season, Distributions from Split-Interest Trusts, Price Includes Uniform, Never Hit Soft

Narrator: These photographs by Buck Ellison take as their subject the real-life figure Erik Prince, reimagined as he might have been around the start of the war in Afghanistan. 

Buck Ellison: The project’s focuses on Erik Prince at exactly my age, thirty-four years old, on his ranch near Cody, Wyoming. And it’s set in 2003.

Erik Prince co-founded the security and mercenary firm Blackwater. The company received widespread notoriety in 2007 when a group of its employees killed seventeen Iraqi civilians in the Nisour square in Baghdad.

Erik Prince is often touted in the media as a war criminal, as a shadow figure in politics, as a monster. And yet, I think with all my work about these real figures, I’m sort of interested in like if a camera allows us to even desire, or be curious, or feel empathy towards a figure like that.

When Erik was thirty-four, he had just gotten his first contract from the Bush administration. It started out with just sort of covert CIA stuff, and then, it really ballooned into, towards the end of the war, he had received billions and dollars of contracts to send men to Iraq, to fight on behalf of our government.

His business was exploding. And then, also, his wife had passed away of cancer the year before. So, he had three young children, and I thought, oh, on a really basic human level, that is difficult for anyone. People, they’re complicated, but I thought this would be an interesting time to come in and look at Erik.

My work on Erik Prince is based a lot on research. This In particular I drew from his book, Civilian Warriors and autobiography of sorts that he wrote to sort of clear his name—that I’ve read a punishing amount of times.

It was all filmed in California using actors, and yet, California, as it often does, is playing Wyoming. So, we shot on two separate ranches.

I’ve done research, but I just wanted to make sure, always, that these things are really authentic. That, for me, is always the goal is less to critique something and more to recreate something with so much precision that it has to be taken seriously.