Roe Ethridge

In his photographs, Roe Ethridge utilizes commercial imagery featuring fashion models, products, advertisements, and personal moments from his everyday life. He blurs the distinction between the generic and the personal, blending art-historical genres like still life and portraiture with the prevalent image culture of today.

Biography of Roe Ethridge

Ethridge earned a BFA from the Atlanta College of Art in 1995 before relocating to New York City two years later, where he worked as a commercial photographer. During this period, Ethridge was working on a project that involved cataloging trees on highway medians, which was inspired by his interest in the typologies of German objective photography to capture the realities and mythologies of the American open road.

While working on this project, he realized that an outtake from a beauty editorial he did for Allure magazine was just "as good or better than anything [he] intentionally made as an 'artist." This realization led to a cross-pollination of fine art and applied practice, which is now the hallmark of Ethridge's work. Ethridge credits his fascination with the artistic approaches of Andy Warhol and Lee Friedlander as the source of his hybrid approach. The fruits of this fusion were first exhibited in MoMA PS1's "Greater New York" in 2000. The exhibit paired an outtake from Ethridge's Allure shoot with a photograph of a UPS store.

In 2005, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, unveiled Ethridge's inaugural solo museum exhibition, "Momentum 4: Roe Ethridge." The showcase featured close-up photographs capturing everyday objects, ranging from a young pine tree to a pink ribbon discovered in Ethridge's mother's basement. 

Associated with the "new school of synthetic photography," his work was featured in the 2008 Whitney Biennial. Later, in 2010, he was one of four artists chosen for the exhibition "New Photography 2010" at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Ethridge received recognition with a mid-career retrospective as part of the FotoFocus Biennial 2016 in Cincinnati. Titled "Roe Ethridge: Nearest Neighbor," the exhibition spanned over fifteen years of his career, tracing the evolution of his visual languages and image-making techniques. The title referenced both the process of editing digital photographs and the recurring presence of family and friends in his work. 

In 2017, the exhibition "Roe Ethridge: Innocence II" at Gagosian in San Francisco showcased a series of large-scale layered photographs printed on brass, along with "Brass Bins," pedestal-like sculptures containing ordinary objects. The two series demonstrate Ethridge's experimental spirit, using multiple exposures, transparencies, and reflections on metallic surfaces to create hybrid figures of fashion model Louise Parker, Looney Tunes characters, and Ethridge himself at different ages.