Herb Sundays 170: Roe Ethridge
The acclaimed photographer with tunes "recommended for driving on the Belt Parkway to calm a jangled nervous system..."
Herb Sundays 170: Roe Ethridge
Playlist: Apple Music, Spotify
Art by Michael Cina.
“Recommended for driving on the Belt Parkway to calm a jangled nervous system from all the violence and stupidity on the news or even better, to soothe the achy, melancholic feelings that come when you are still 32 mins drive away from your new love.”
-Roe Ethridge for Herb Sundays
From the Gagosian site bio:
“In his photographs, Roe Ethridge 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.”
“Born in Miami, Ethridge received a BFA from the Atlanta College of Art in 1995. He moved to New York City two years later and began working as a commercial photographer…Ethridge realized that an outtake from a beauty editorial he did for Allure magazine was “as good or better than anything [he] intentionally made as an ‘artist.’” This realization would set in motion a continuous cross-pollination of fine art and applied practice that has come to be the hallmark of Ethridge’s work, and which he often traces back to his fascination with the artistic approaches of Andy Warhol and Lee Friedlander. The results of this hybrid approach were exhibited for the first time in MoMA PS1’s Greater New York in 2000, in which an outtake from the Allure shoot and a photograph of a UPS store that Ethridge were paired together.”
Ethridge’s large-format style appeals to the side of me that loved the licked surface of fashion photography, looking at my sister’s copies of Vogue and other magazines as a teen. The mid-late 90s era was awash with beautiful, aloof campaigns like Glen Luchford for Prada or Mario Testino for Gucci under Tom Ford, which really set my mind ablaze, even though I didn’t yet know the photographers’ names. Roe’s work often wrangles in the space between the would-be banality of William Eggleston and the luxurious world of the commercial, which gives them an uncomfortable quality. Are we being seduced? Duped? Held enraptured to a comfy nostalgia, or is the boring truth being brushed up into a place worthy of its actual nature? This is the good stuff.
The vaguely spiritual aspects of the commercial, why Richard Prince’s Cowboys still loom large, is also Roe’s beat; he’s almost making the original inputs of what Prince re-captured, not dissimilar to how the last decade musicians have tried to create original versions of the soul/funk stuff that was sampled in the ‘90s.
I arrived on Ethridge like many other artists I’ve come to love, via the humble record sleeve. Two early 00’s projects (I seem to be stuck there, thanks a lot Herb 162 Ottessa Moshfegh) employed Roe’s hyperreal style to significant effect: The semi-debut releases of Andrew WK (Ann Arbor’s own Andrew Fetterly Wilkes-Krier, who I always forget is my age), he of Bulb Records/Wolf Eyes-adjacent provenance, and Fischerspooner, the art school duo (and Jeffrey Deitch-supported band) of Warren Fischer and Casey Spooner who attempted a coup on the culture, sending up fashion and performance art manouevres via electro-pop download speeds. Both projects had a commercial surreality to them and their production, which was enhanced by Ethridge’s mythmaking abilities.
Both projects are aided by Ethridge’s white hot studio light as the other artist in the room. Both sets of images, in Ethridge’s gaze, serve as pomo-reconfigured male archetypes: WK as street tuff / embattled hesher (blood, the model’s own) and Spooner as Svengali or arch dandy (where greasepaint, sweat, spittle tend to fly). The images nestled nicely into the Vice Magazine sleaze aesthetic of the time, but something about his work felt more significant to me. The era, including the post-9/11 moment (captured brilliantly in W. David Marx’s new book, of course), allowed performers, often not of the most incredible musical talent, but with the biggest ideas, to put forth a composed vision and be given ample press coverage. Of course, the most successful version of this downtown-to-mainstream siege was James Murphy’s LCD Soundsystem. I wonder if they ever considered working together?
The Andrew WK cover feels like the forebear to another NYC upstart, or Cameron Winter’s solo debut cover shot by Adam Powell, both as provocations but with a strange vulnerability. WK spoke with Grantland about his cover image and his love of Ethridge in 2012. I never knew that the two projects above were connected:
The cover of I Get Wet has become pretty iconic. Can you tell me the story behind it? I know Roe Ethridge shot the photo.
Yes. I met [Ethridge] at a performance by Fischerspooner. I had met them and was playing some shows with them. The first one was at a Starbucks in this neighborhood Astor Place in Manhattan. I was watching them play and there was this guy I was standing next to. I started talking to him and I found out that he was the one who had been taking photos of [Fischerspooner]. I was so blown away by their photos and so impressed by how high quality they were. They really looked professional, and I always wanted everything I did to look really good, like a movie poster. He said he would love to do a photo shoot with me and wouldn’t charge me anything except the cost of the film, which was so kind of him. We took a bunch of photographs and we were using a large-format camera, where you have one piece of film at a time. It’s a slow, painstaking process. It’s not snap-snap-snap. We had two frames of film left, that was it. So I excused myself and came back with the bloody nose. We took one close-up photo that we used for the album cover, then we took another one that was further away where I was smiling, and that was it. There’s powers intervening in those situations that have very little to do with me, and with all due respect to him, little to do with [Ethridge], even though he’s a master artist. What he did was phenomenal, but that photo was meant to be.
The story I heard was that you hit yourself in the face with a brick. Then I’ve heard that’s actually not true.
I have talked about it in different ways, especially recently. I’ve been working with much younger people and I’ve tried to be very sensitive about self-mutilation and things like that that I’ve enjoyed. And I never really did it as an abusive type of behavior, it was more like a stimulating, kind of empowering, almost erotic type of having fun with pain. But I did stop talking about how that photo was made, because I didn’t want to encourage young people to think they had to hurt themselves to be cool or to even take a cool photo. Sometimes that’s how you get the results you’re looking for. I used to cut my face up a lot and all kinds of stuff like that. I don’t know what it was, maybe just building up my threshold for pain, which certainly has come in handy.
Cat Power and Superchunk have also used Ethridge’s work, but surprisingly, no one has tapped him (or he has declined) to shoot the next classic. Let’s get after it, music industry.
I was nervous about approaching Roe, but I got the nerve up and he shared this heartsick little playlist, which is wonderful and perfect for that happy/sad mood state.
bonus beat
I spoke with Teddy (T.M.) Brown for SSENSE about Ghostly’s new book, available now at the following stores and more.
Hey, great read as always. Loved how Ethridge blurs the lines between commercial and fine art; it’s like a visual algorithm for disrupting the ideal. So relatable, that drive to new love!