Roe Ethridge, the fruitful exchange between art and commerce

Roe Ethridge (Miami, 1969) was at the beginning of her career when Philip-Lorca diCorcia warned her about finding her own voice.

“I have more than one”, answered the young man, aware of his tendency towards multiple perspectives.

Hence, over the years he has shaped a style that is as unclassifiable as it is characteristic of his paradoxes.

A way of looking at the world that the photographer likes to compare to a musical fugue, where harmony goes hand in hand with discord and the different voices interpose one over the other;

or with a mental flight, the state in which for a time one loses the sense of one's own identity.

Sensations that come from different domains, as intimate as generic,

'Decanter with Fish for Tiffany', 2017. From the book 'American Polychronic' (Mack, 2022).Roe Ethridge / Courtesy the artist and MACK

'Pic N' Clip Glitch NFT', 2021. From the book 'American Polychronic' (Mack, 2022).Roe Ethridge / Courtesy the artist and MACK

'Refrigerator', 1999. From the book 'American Polychronic' (Mack, 2022).Roe Ethridge / Courtesy the artist and MACK

'Izzy Abeyta for Polychronic', 2022. From the book 'American Polychronic' (Mack, 2022).Roe Ethridge / Courtesy the artist and MACK

'Oslo at Willet's Point', 2019. From the book 'American Polychronic' (Mack, 2022).Roe Ethridge / Courtesy the artist and MACK

'Laila Gohar with the Egyptian Sunday Dinner', 2019. From the book 'American Polychronic' (Mack, 2022).Roe Ethridge / Courtesy the artist and MACK

'Ambulance Accident', 1999. From the book 'American Polychronic' (Mack, 2022).Roe Ethridge / Courtesy the artist and MACK

'Sarahbeth with a pipe', 2006. From the book 'American Polychronic' (Mack, 2022).Roe Ethridge / Courtesy the artist and MACK

American Polychronic

(Mack), is presented as a sort of catalog raisonné of Ethridge's work.

The monograph brings together more than 400 photographs belonging to both the work carried out as editorial and advertising commissions as well as his personal work, all of them taken between 1999 and 2022. A note at the end of the book explains to the reader the sequencing of the photographs, a chronological order in which the artistic work is presented from the oldest to the newest, starting from the first page, while the commercial work acquires the opposite order;

from the newest images to the oldest.

The pages are not numbered and, in order to mislead the reader even more in his transit through a universe of unlikely connections and eclectic contrasts, the photo captions are scattered like screenshots throughout the book,

images that are integrated into the artistic corpus.

What the photographer refers to as the “cross-pollution of artistic practice with commercial practice” reaches its highest levels in this publication.

'Oslo at Willet's Point', 2019. From the book 'American Polychronic' (Mack, 2022).Roe Ethridge / Courtesy the artist and MACK

If something defines Ethridge it is the fruitful result of this exchange.

His ability to have known how to broaden both the artistic photography scene and that of commercial photography, redefining both fields under the author's own terms (a double path explored by other photographers such as Juergen Teller and Wolfgang Tillmans), through such an approach fresh and variegated that speaks to us of its need to transform the expectations, both those of the author and of the spectator.

The turning point that defined his career came in 1999, when the photographer was commissioned to shoot editor Katrryn Neale for

It was then that he realized that one of the polaroids made during that session was much more suggestive than the personal project he was working on then, anchored in a conceptual base.

Since then, the photographer has focused his search on finding new forms, on venturing into the unexpected, either through images that refer to his most intimate environment or through others that show us the realm of the ordinary.

In his work, the technical mastery required by commercial practice is combined with a more reflective mood that alludes to the meaning of photography in today's world.

He is capable of turning the familiar into something strange;

to combine the most traditional standards of beauty with the

.

In the same way, he creates new meanings through the establishment of unsuspected connections, in an attempt to challenge that delimitation that surrounds photography, by which what the photographer does must be understandable, something that does not happen with painting.

'Ambulance Accident', 1999. From the book 'American Polychronic' (Mack, 2022).Roe Ethridge / Courtesy the artist and MACK

Thus, in Ethridge's photography there is no distinction between the document and the constructed, between the created and the appropriated, or between the art and the editorial.

His experimental spirit is the way to evade existing categories, to reflect on the characteristics of an America built through different voices that reverberate in a single look.

American Polychronic

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