THE BOYFRIEND CASTING: ROSIE HARRIET ELLIS

ROSIE HARRIET ELLIS: THE BOYFRIEND CASTING
Words: 884
Estimated reading time: 5M
THE PHOTOGRAPHER’S NEW BOOK WRESTLES WITH THE INTERPLAY OF POWER AND INTIMACY.
By Megan Hullander
Imagine trying to photograph your way out of heartbreak. Or back into love. Or at least toward some kind of narrative coherence about the mess where sex, power, and image all blur into one another. This is more or less the ground The Boyfriend Casting stands on—a five-year photographic excavation by London-based artist Rosie Harriet Ellis, in which the “boyfriend” is not so much a person as a shifting archetype: exes, almosts, stand-ins, hopefuls, the half-naked willing, the nakedly ambivalent.
What starts as a portrait project quickly turns inside out. The subject is nominally male—posed, casted, directed—but the real subject is Rosie herself. Her desire, her grief, her discomfort with the lens’s power and her simultaneous refusal to give it up. The photographs span styles and tones, clinical one moment, diaristic the next. But they always circle the same questions. What does it mean to look? To expose? To consent?
The Boyfriend Casting began, almost paradoxically, in the tangled liminal space of love and loss—or rather, the simultaneous emergence and disintegration of these states. Rosie’s first collaborator and lover, Nick, pulled the rug out from under the project when his parents—emblems of a certain corporate conservatism—demanded that his naked images be excised from the internet despite having been there, fully exposed, for two years prior. This moment was itself representative of consent’s slippery choreography: an abrupt withdrawal, an unceremonious retraction of permission, a palpable clash between the artist’s will and the social, familial, and internal limits that govern how desire, exposure, and ownership play out in lived reality. Nick eventually regranted consent, and the images once lost make the beginning of The Boyfriend Casting.
Rosie’s work is a deliberate layering of objectification and control. The men she photographs are not presented as flesh-and-blood, but as “still life,” as commodified objects, as “handbags to sell” (her phrase, oscillating between satirical detachment and a kind of bruised emotional candor). One segment features men she only speaks to in instructions. Imagine: “Chin down. Shoulder back. No, not like that.” A script that turns the intimate into the transactional, the personal into the procedural.
Strangely, this cool distance is precisely what allows something intimate and pulsing to seep through. It’s not a matter of dispassion; it’s a strategic, almost surgical imposition of order on chaos. A tightrope walk between vulnerability and power where both poles flicker and bleed into each other.
You get the persistent impression that Rosie is wrestling with multiple, overlapping performances: the performance of love, of intimacy, of being a female artist wielding the camera with authority and uncertainty. This simultaneous desire for domination and surrender—the pain and exhilaration of intimacy as refracted through the crucible of artistic mediation—and the almost clinical deconstruction of “the boyfriend” into a lexicon of poses and surfaces sets up a profoundly uneasy dynamic. Rosie’s relationship with the camera, and the camera’s relentless mediation of her lovers (both real and casted), play like a taut chord struck between power and vulnerability.
The Boyfriend Casting interrogates thorny issues around the politics of the gaze. Rosie insists on signed consent, yet the asymmetry of power is glaring—she is the photographer, director, and agent who removes the “human” from the moment to heighten abstraction. And yet the clinical framing paradoxically deepens intimacy—because to be objectified with consent is, paradoxically, to be witnessed in a hyper-specific, almost ritualistic way that both effaces and affirms personhood.
Her partners vulnerability, which is “like a gift,” alongside Rosie’s own complicated entanglement with the camera, reveals a profound ambivalence at the boundary between subject and artist, authenticity and performance.
The Boyfriend Casting is, in the end, a diary of love and control, an autopsy of romance in stark frames and deliberate poses, and a simultaneously tender and brutal inquiry into how we see each other—and ourselves—when the lens turns.
The Boyfriend Casting book launch will take place on June 19 at 20 Rue Dupetit-Thouars in Paris.





PHOTOGRAPHY
ROSIE HARRIET ELLIS
Beyond Noise 2025
PHOTOGRAPHY
ROSIE HARRIET ELLIS
Beyond Noise 2025