Roe Ethridge

Vogue Girl · November 3, 2021

In his photographs, Roe Ethridge uses the real to suggest—or disrupt—the ideal. Through commercial images of fashion models, products, and advertisements, as well as intimate moments from his own daily life, he reveals the fine line between the generic and the personal, merging art-historical genres such as the still life or portrait with the increasingly pervasive image culture of the present.

Born in Miami, Ethridge received a BFA from the Atlanta College of Art in 1995. He moved to New York City two years later and began working as a commercial photographer. During this time, he was producing a series that catalogued trees on highway medians, seeking to apply his interest in the typologies of German objective photography to the realities (and mythologies) of the American open road. While working on this project, which he looks back on as an attempt at “tough, smart, conceptual” photography, Ethridge realized that an outtake from a beauty editorial he did for Allure magazine was “as good or better than anything [he] intentionally made as an ‘artist.’” This realization would set in motion a continuous cross-pollination of fine art and applied practice that has come to be the hallmark of Ethridge’s work, and which he often traces back to his fascination with the artistic approaches of Andy Warhol and Lee Friedlander. The results of this hybrid approach were exhibited for the first time in MoMA PS1’s Greater New York in 2000, in which an outtake from the Allure shoot and a photograph of a UPS store that Ethridge were paired together.

In 2005 the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, presented Ethridge’s first solo museum exhibition, Momentum 4: Roe Ethridge, which included close-up photographs of ordinary things—from a young pine tree to a pink ribbon that Ethridge found in his mother’s basement. Identified with what was being called “the new school of synthetic photography,” his work was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial, and two years later he was one of four artists selected for the exhibition New Photography 2010 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Ethridge’s photograph Old Fruit (2010)—a deadpan shot of a bowl of rotting produce, its grimy banality contrasting with the airbrushed, hyperbolized glamour of his editorial images. The breadth of Ethridge’s subject matter and style would be showcased further in 2012, in a solo exhibition at Le Consortium, Dijon, France. The show, which subsequently traveled to Museum Leuven, Belgium, included photographs of overflowing ashtrays juxtaposed with outtakes from fashion photo shoots, close-ups of the surfaces of a suburban backyard, a large snake slithering through dry grasses, and other images that refuse to settle into a single narrative.

Ethridge was celebrated with a mid-career survey as part of the FotoFocus Biennial 2016 in Cincinnati. Spanning over fifteen years of his career, Roe Ethridge: Nearest Neighbor traced the (pointedly nonlinear) evolution of his visual languages and image-making techniques—its title referring both to the process of editing digital photographs and to the recurrence of family and friends in his work. The 2017 exhibition Roe Ethridge: Innocence II, at Gagosian in San Francisco, featured a series of large-scale layered photographs printed on brass, as well as several Brass Bins, pedestal-like sculptures containing ordinary objects. Both series attest to the spirit of experimentation that drives Ethridge’s practice, with multiple exposures, transparencies, and reflections synthesizing on the gleaming metallic surfaces—producing chimeric figures out of fashion model Louise Parker, Looney Tunes characters, and even Ethridge himself, pictured at various ages.

gagosian.com