Roe Ethridge

A sequence has to sing. It’s not just something to decode and find the true meaning of. I have to feel its harmonies and disharmonies.
—Roe Ethridge

In his photographs, Roe Ethridge uses the real to suggest—or disrupt—the ideal. Through advertisements and commercial shots of products and fashion models, as well as in images of 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 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 in 1997 and had his first solo exhibition there in 1998; he also began working as a commercial photographer. During this time, Ethridge was producing images of trees on highway medians, applying his interest in German objective photography to the mythologized American open road. While working on this project, he realized that an outtake from a beauty editorial he shot for Allure magazine was “as good or better than anything [he] intentionally made as an ‘artist.’” The epiphany sparked a cross-pollination of fine art and applied practice that has become the hallmark of his work, and that he often also traces back to a fascination with 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 2003, Ethridge’s photograph of a pigeon in flight—an image later used in an advertising campaign for Comme des Garçons Shirt—appeared on the cover of Artforum.

In 2005 the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, presented Ethridge’s first solo museum exhibition, Momentum 4: Roe Ethridge, which focused on close-up photographs of ordinary things. Identified with what was being called “the new school of synthetic photography,” the artist’s work was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial; two years later it appeared in New Photography 2010 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. A solo exhibition at Le Consortium, Dijon, France, in 2012, which traveled to Museum Leuven, Belgium, included photographs of overflowing ashtrays juxtaposed with outtakes from fashion shoots, close-ups of a suburban backyard, and other images that refuse to settle into a single narrative.