Roe Ethridge

Whilst researching for our latest issue "Thereness", we came across a selection of videos on featured artist Roe Ethridge. In this particular interview with MoMa's Curator of Photography, Roxana Marcoci, Ethridge discusses his experience of working in commercial photography and its influence on his personal projects, and in the process gives us an interesting insight into his unique approach to making fugues that are achieved through what he refers to as "amnesic states of wondering".

Here is an extract from Maggie Gray’s article in issue 12 of 1000 Words:

"Roe Ethridge studied at Atlanta College of Art, after which he found work as a catalogue photographer to make ends meet, so the theme of day to day luxury and branding is one he knows well. On top of influencing his subject choices, Ethridge’s commercial experience informs the eclecticism of his style. Working to other people’s briefs throws up a host of visual and thematic scenarios. As Ethridge put it in this interview, he can photograph “a golden retriever one day and an underwear model the next.” He brings the same incongruous variety to Le Luxe: a turn of the page leads the viewer straight from bikini-clad women to a thoughtful shot of an empty maple syrup jar. Unlikely reverberations and echoes emerge throughout the book. One photograph depicts men breaking up stone slabs for the Goldman Sachs construction. In three others, similar slabs feature as impromptu ashtrays. Are they from the same source? Does it matter if they’re not, if the associations still resound? Other themes, such as Ethridge’s fascination with textural surfaces, are woven more intrinsically into the whole. His free and associative combinations deliberately reflect the heterogeneity of a photographic career – the juggling of projects, the frequent unsolicited finds and the constant casting about for inspiration. Nothing in his work happens in isolation as he draws, untethered, from his entire visual practice.

That Ethridge is prepared to include images from all areas of his work, and beyond (he regularly borrows from public sources such as newspapers and online media) is a powerful thing in itself. Some of the pictures he employs are pixelated and blurred, brazenly failing the standard tests of ‘good’ photography. But contemporary life sees a constant bombardment of images, good and poor, particularly online where they are circulated, replicated, cropped and corrupted with ease. Ethridge is one of several artists who have taken the plunge, raiding this plethora of modern photographs to create work that – to quote video artist Hito Steyerl – offers a “defence of the poor image” instead of bemoaning it. This practice of grabbing, scanning and pasting from other sources raises thorny questions of ownership and originality which Ethridge confronts with humorous candour."

Also worth flagging up is this short interview and slideshow of Ethridge's work created by The Photographers' Gallery as part of the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2011 and, finally, here is an installation video of Ethridge's exhibition Le Luxe II BHGG at the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills that took place June 9 - July 21, 2011.

1000 Words Photography Magazine #12

I am delighted to inform you that issue 12 of 1000 Words "Thereness" is now available to view online at www.1000wordsmag.com














Featuring portfolios from Léonie Hampton, Chris Shaw, Maja Forsslund, Rinko Kawauchi, Ordinary Light Photography and Roe Ethridge alongside in-depth interviews, essays and reviews by Louise Clements, Simon Baker, Lucy Davies, Natasha Christia, Brad Feuerhelm and Margaret Gray, 1000 Words attempts to show a kind of photography that draws directly and honestly from life; work that does not fit neatly into categories yet which can be infinitely more rigorous and fresher than any attempts at visual gimmickry made by the latest tricks of the trade.

In line with this, we also cover new titles from Andy Sewell, C Photo and Enrique Metinides in the dedicated books section courtesy of texts from Michael Grieve, Oliver Whitehead and Daniel Campbell Blight.

"[...]'Thereness' is a sense of the subject's reality, a heightened sense of its physicality, etched sharply into the image. It is a sense that we are looking at the world directly, without mediation. Or rather, that something other than a mere photographer is mediating. [...] Such a feeling, such alertness, when present in the photograph, can of course conceal the greatest photographic art. 'Thereness' is seen at the opposite ends of the photographic spectra, in the humblest holiday enprint as much as the most serious art photograph, in the snapshot-inspired, dynamic small camera candid as much as the calm, meditative, large camera view. Those photographs which conjure up a compelling desire to touch the subject, to walk into the picture, to know the photographed person, display 'thereness'. Those photographs which tend towards impressionism, expressionism or abstraction can be in danger of losing it, or never finding it [...]. 'Thereness', in short, is a quality that has everything to do with reality and little to do with art, yet is, I would reiterate, the essence of the art of photography".

From The Art That Hides Itself - Notes on Photography's Quiet Genius by Gerry Badger

Thanks to all the photographers, writers and editorial and production team as well as of course our advertisers for contributing to yet another fantastic issue of 1000 Words.

Enjoy dear readers, and please take note of our new studio address: 1000 Words Photography Ltd, 29 The Arthaus, 205 Richmond Road, London, E8 3FF

Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2011

As a key event in the UK's photography calender, the 15th Deutsche Börse Photography Prize has finally opened it's doors at Ambika P3. The winner, to be heralded as the photographer who has made "the most significant contribution to photography in Europe between 1 October 2009 and 30 September 2010", will be announced on the 26 April from the shortlist of Thomas Demand, Roe Ethridge, Jim Goldberg, and Elad Lassry.















© Thomas Demand, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn/ DACS

Demand’s concise yet strangely unsettling images explore German social and political life, with spaces ranging from the interior of the Bonn Parliament in the late 1960s to the artist’s’ childhood room. His works subtly reveal the mechanisms of their making, and challenge the viewer’s perception of reality by examining memory and photographic truth.






















© Roe Ethridge/ Courtesy of Greengrassi London/ Andrew Kreps Gallery/ Mai 36 Gallery

Blurring the boundaries of the commercial with the editorial, and the mundane with the highbrow, Roe Ethridge’s conceptual approach to photography is a playful comment on the traditions and conventions of the medium itself. Often borrowing ‘outtakes’ from his own commercial photography work, Ethridge readily juxtaposes a catwalk shot with a still-life of a pumpkin or a pastoral scene of cows grazing. His distinct yet elusive and poetic groupings of portraits, landscapes and still lifes, create new associations and embrace the arbitrariness of the image and image making.


















© Jim Goldberg/ Magnum Photos

Jim Goldberg’s series Open See documents the experiences of refugee, immigrant and trafficked populations who travel from war torn, socially and economically devastated countries to make new lives in Europe. Originating from Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and the Middle East, these ‘new Europeans’ have met violence and brutality as well as hope and liberation in their new homes. Goldberg employs his varied and experimental approaches to photographic storytelling to reflect on issues of migration and the conditions for desiring escape through the exploitation of a range of photographic vernacular and moving image.


















Image © Elad Lassry, Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery

In his seductive yet detached photographs and films, Elad Lassry highlights the strange in the over-familiar. Drawing on source material such as advertising and stock imagery for inspiration, Lassry’s over-saturated photographs are often collages of pre-existing images or newly staged studio photographs that allude to the visual language of product photography. Constantly shifting between ‘original’ and found materials, Lassry instigates a dialogue between photography and the moving image to explore ideas of authorship, originality and appropriation.

If you're excited, disgruntled or feeling generally pensive about the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize, we've started a discussion on Facebook where you can bounce ideas around.