9. Roe Ethridge

Roe Ethridge lives and works in New York.

Ethridge’s work has shown extensively in the United States and internationally. He was recently included in the New Photography show at the MoMA and the Les Recontres D’Arles Photography Show and Prize, and recently short-listed for the Deutsche-Boerse Prize for Photography. He was included in the Whitney Biennial in 2008, and will have a major retrospective at Le Consortium in Dijon curated by Anne Pontegnie in 2012.


Roe Ethridge (American, born 1969) studied photography at the Atlanta College of Art. He shoots in “editorial mode” and also borrows images already in circulation, including outtakes from his own commercial work, sometimes already published in other contexts. “Everything seems to end up in a magazine sooner or later,” Ethridge has said. Drawing upon the descriptive power of photography and the ease with which it can be accessed, duplicated, and recombined, the artist orchestrates visual fugues, juxtaposing, for example, a picture in which he has superimposed an image of a plain white plate, grabbed from Bed Bath & Beyond’s website, on a checkered Comme des Garçons scarf; a photograph of a model dressed in an Alexander McQueen shirt posing against a tripod, which he took at Pier 59 in New York; two filmic pictures of a Julliard ballet student; a still life of moldy fruit he previously published in Vice magazine; a catwalk shot from the Chanel spring 2009 fashion show grabbed from The New York Times; an image of a pumpkin that is a magnified close-up of a sticker; and a picture of a red bag in a corner of the artist’s studio. 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, 2010