American, born 1969. Studied photography at the Atlanta College of Art. Lives and works in New York.
Mr Roe Ethridge is a leading figure in conceptual photography today. In his photographs, he 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. Ethridge has been commissioned by clients such as Calvin Klein, Chanel, and Louis Vuitton and his work has been shown extensively in the United States and internationally. He has been included in the New Photography show at the MoMA, 2010 and short-listed for the Deutsche-Boerse Prize for Photography. He was included in the Whitney Biennial in 2008, and had a major retrospective at Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati in 2016.
Drawing upon the descriptive power of photography and the ease with which it can be accessed, duplicated, and recombined, the artist orchestrates visual fugues …The pictures acquire their meaning from the salient way in which they have been shuffled, sequenced, and laid out in nonlinear narrative structures. Combining and recombining already recontextualized images, Ethridge at once subverts the photographs’ original roles and renews their signifying possibilities. — Museum of Modern Art, New York
As technically adept as a commercial photographer yet as thoughtful as a Conceptualist about photography’s role and meaning in the modern world, Ethridge believes the ubiquity of the photograph, the instantaneity of its transmission and reception in this age of increasing “ecstatic communication” is to be embraced rather than mourned. In his work there appears no cause and no ending, no discrimination between editorial and art, between document and construct, between technology and affect.
