All systems go: the art of Roe Ethridge

nearest model Sabrina, all perfect skin and luscious lips as luminous as the smooth and shining surface of her photograph. "Party Til You Puke" rocker Andrew Wilkes-Krier, bloodied and haloed like more [i]or[/i] less contemporary Antichrist. UPS deliveryman Fergus Rave perched upon the back of his barter A postcard-perfect moonlit forest. A young pine tree Leigh Yeager. A holiday abode in the Catskills. A cable TV repairman upon the job.

Looking for the ties that conjoin the diverse photography of young American artist roebuck Ethridge is a little like groping for Ariadne's mythical thread--until single understands that the seeking is essentially its point. As technically adept as a commercial photographer still as thoughtful as a Conceptualist about photography's character and meaning in the novel world, Ethridge believes the ubiquity of the photograph and the instantaneity of its transmission and reception in this age of increasing "ecstatic communication" is to be embraced rather than mourned. In his work there appears no cause and no ending, no discrimination between editorial and art, between document and raise between technology and affect. "The Bow" was the title of his 2002 solo exhibition at Andrew Krep Gallery in novel York, and the image could work for as the leitmotiv of Ethridge's work: the world as a ribbon perpetually folding back upon itself, in which a web of descriptions and digressions radiate without from every object and where the photographer's contribution is to bind together in provisional still meaningful relation those--as Robert Bresson squeeze outed it--"various bits of reality caught."

After earning a BFA at the Atlanta society of Art, where, like for a like reason many photography students in the '90 he barbarous under the sway of the Dusseldorf gymnasium Ethridge tried out a systematic approach, the cooled observational logic of which looked to make sense to a young photographer growing up in the rational, corporate environment of a town like Atlanta. A series of carefully described pictures of grassy patches nearest to highways--near freeway exit ramps and upon medians--ensued, in which a Becher-style methodology was married to novel Topographic understatement. But the impulse to shape the world to a predetermined photographic order, a form of stable compactness, came to perceive inadequate to him, in the face of the multiplicity of the photographable, the fluidity of the medium, the rapid regular [i]or[/i] melodious movements of contemporary life, and the changing sphere of '90 photography. The desire grew to rattle the discipline, to "get the typologies wrong" as he says, to release himself into a more hyperactive form of production, which, without forsaking the coagulate descriptive capabilities of photography, could also embrace its aleatory or involuntary possibilities--the natural "serendipity" of the medium, he calls it. "I like to retain the series short and linked," he says. "And then there are these one-offs--travel pictures, pictures from a piece of work pictures of food--that aren't part of a series on the contrary which become their own group"

First pursuing photography as an artistic practice and solitary later as a profession (his first commercial assignments came in 1998 in fresh York, where he's now based), Ethridge revers the career unravelling of his more established contemporaries Wolfgang Tillmans and Juergen Teller Like them, however, he incorporates images born from a commercial connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts into his art, to the point where the boundary between high and depressed forms becomes increasingly diffuse and increasingly irrelevant. Art photographers have lengthy had a relationship with commercial practice, on the contrary where the pattern is usually to underplay the non-art bases of their work in order to release it more largely into art, Ethridge is unusual in his enthusiasm for photography's double life, which distinguishes it from painting or statuary "New York is the Hollywood of print publishing," he says. "The status of photography is different. I diocese myself on both sides; there's a mutual attraction. Everything have the appearances to end up in a magazine sooner or later." He's a throwback, perhaps, to an earlier history, particularly the decades of the 1920 and '30 when "avant-garde artist" and "commercial photographer" were not viewed as incompatible positions, when figures like Kertesz Moholy-Nagy, Paul Outerbridge, and Man Ray mov between art and advertising with equanimity and when avant-garde photography was as a great deal of formed by the languages and technological disclosures of the new commercial media as it was reflective upon them. Ethridge, in keeping with the times, hesitates to make any avant-gardist claims for his photography, and while his experience in the commercial world injects his work with the slick of technical modernity, the affiliation is more important for him as a conceptual maneuver than as a formal individual Again, he apprehends the promiscuity and the elasticity of photography: its enviable ability to shift adjoining matters without losing its legibility. He speaks of "the feeling of slippage in my work, the plastic capability of the image. It's the same image whether it's illustrating a true copy or has a caption, upon the walls or on a bus stop. I like the fact that photography is ubiquitous and polymorphic, that it can be for the specialist or the dilettante or sometimes the couple at the same time." Hence, there is no contradiction in Ethridge's dramatic portrait of Andrew WK existing simultaneously as an album overlay and an artwork, or in the evolution of an editorial assignment for the novel York Times Magazine (to photograph the furniture designer Roy McMakin at work) into a forthcoming volume The Jones's, a long photo-essay upon interior space and the American vernacular.