If you still think Roe Ethridge‘s work is the kind of thing you would find in an average commercial photographer’s portfolio, might I suggest spending some time with Simply Beautiful, a group show of National Geographic nature photographers. There is a noticeable difference between the National Geographic work and Ethridge’s random collections of photographs: it isn’t skill or artistic intent, but a level of subtlety. Even in Ethridge’s pictures of birds in mid flight, he was able to create stunning but seamless images that downplayed his own hand in the making of the work, allowing the images to be beautiful in the most traditional of ways while remaining quiet and eloquent.
In comparison, every nature photograph in Simply Beautiful shows the natural world only from the most dramatic point of view in the most spectacular of light, reducing nature to an afterthought of photographic skill. So we have photographs of nature that are trite and disposable, just the kind of thing that one might find in a National Geographic.
Through Nov. 23rd
Steven Kasher Gallery (521 W 23rd St. Btw. 10th & 11th Aves.)
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