Roe Ethridge
"Roe Ethridge" by Adam Harrison, Winter 2008, pp. 108-109
Roe Ethridge is an easy artist to misread or misunderstand. His images are wildly diverse in subject and vary in technique. His straightforward photographs are connected in obscure, labyrinthine ways, which can be confusing, but they reward sustained looking.
Much has been made of Ethridge’s relationship to commercial photography—its reflection in the form of his work, and the potential aesthetic impact of his willingness to accept commissions. Some have connected his practice to the strain of photography practised by artists such as Wolfgang Tillmans, Ryan McGinley and Juergen Teller, who, over the past decade, have all moved fluidly between the commercial/editorial context of the magazine and the gallery. This zeitgeist merges high culture, pop culture and subculture, and might be understood as analogous to the incorporation of illustration and graphic-design tropes into the traditions of painting and drawing. But while Ethridge is superficially in line with this trend, his practice should instead be understood in relation to photographers like Walker Evans, for whom commissioned work allowed the exploration of broader problems within the medium of photography rather than the cultivation of a commercially consumable style.
Ethridge’s photographic practice is unsettled and tenuous, yet always considered. He makes pictures that relate to each other, but are conceived and produced individually. Their interrelation occurs not on the level of subject matter, theme, style or concept; rather, the images are part of an overall program of depiction that may seem related to journalism and stock photography, but which illustrates a desire to see things—whatever the subject—as photographs.
While each installation of his works creates a new dialogue, the juxtapositions he has made in the past have been fairly decipherable. In his recent exhibition at Sutton Lane in Paris, however, connections among the works seemed intentionally suppressed. This could have made the work seem aimless, but instead foregrounds how Ethridge values pictorial experimentation over producing an easily digestible body of work. He convincingly argues against the seriality and linearity that are ubiquitous in contemporary photography.
Instead of reiterating a theme or subject in a cohesive (but redundant) group of images, Ethridge includes a lunar photograph, still lifes (including a superb Manet-inspired photograph of oysters), a digital collage, a self-portrait, enlargements of Polaroids and two very different approaches to the monochrome. In other words, Ethridge cuts a swath across the photographic medium with a rigour that proves his love of photography and induces similar feelings in the viewer. Instead of presenting viewers with a sustained and logical meditation on a particular theme or subject, he forces them to create their own connections, make multiple value judgments and look at the works carefully. He disallows passive viewing, encouraging us to read his works as experimentally as he has made them.
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