ROE ETHRIDGE

Roe Ethridge’s photography emanates from his direct experience of the world. His oeuvre melds conceptual photography with commercial work, including outtakes from his own shoots and borrowed images already in circulation in other contexts. With this democratic attitude, Ethridge works to capture the vivid and intimate details of his shifting locales within photography’s classic genres of portrait, landscape, and still life. The diverse and sometimes abstruse nature of Ethridge’s imagery—vintage movie posters, fashion models, a pink rose, a mop bucket, a concrete mixer—oscillates between the spontaneous and the staged with such subtlety that it is often difficult to ascertain his elected approach with regard to individual images. Drawing upon photography’s descriptive power and its accessibility, he copies and recombines images, subverting their original status in order to regenerate their signifying possibilities, and in so doing, infuse them with a new sense of mysterious contingency.