Roe bomaye! Roe bomaye! Roe bomaye! The King is here! For my money, when the last ten years of photographic history is surveyed, Roe Ethridge will be what was happening in photography. From similar artists like Mark Wyse and Collier Schorr to pale imitations like Elad Lassry and Torbjorn Rodland to the countless graduate thesis shows currently being hung, his impact is undeniable.
Ethridge’s ambitious drive to celebrate the rise of available images, combined with his brazen curating of the most disparate assortments of his own self-created vernacular images to form a cohesive body of work, is a photographic joy. Simply put he is better than any other photographer of his generation. Roe bomaye! Roe bomaye! Roe bomaye! The King is here!
Even if you have no interest in tired discussions of the vernacular or the objecthood of the image that surround his work, Ehtridge’s pictures are deceptively simple. He puts together compelling images whose connection can seem abstract, but given time and the right mindset, they often coalesce into a rather cohesive description of the world. In his last two bodies of work, Rockaway and Rockaway Redux, a worn snapshot of streets at night, a jaunty young sailor or a seductive menu-picture of an oyster dish convincingly stood as visual evidence of life in a working class surf town.
In Le Luxe, Ethridge leaves the beach town, gets on the subway to the world of the 9 to 5. He reinvents an assignment covering the building of Goldman Sachs corporate offices in better times, where construction workers, skyscrapers and Henry Paulson all brush up against each other. But Ethridge isn’t satisfied with simply pushing together class divides as they work to build another shiny building. In the show, all that that remains from the original assignment is a picture of Hank Paulson with Hillary Clinton, a picture of a skyscraper, and, if you want to stretch things as Etheridge always invites, a large modernist bookshelf that you have to walk around to enter the gallery.
The rest of the show is Ethridge’s usual fare, which does raise the question of where else Ethridge can take his work, aside from switching the subject matter? At what point does he become a faded caricature of himself that is nothing better than his many imitators? Ah, heavy is the head that wears the crown. But if you enjoy Ethridge’s work, the book version of Le Luxe rewards one’s faith. Ethridge takes his use of vernacular images a step further, past blown up pixels right into screen grabs of the pictures being worked up on photoshop. It is absurd, but it is hard not to appreciate the lengths he is going to push the boundaries of what constitute an image. In doing so, he is inevitably provoking the rancor of an older generation while asking for every bad audience Q&A question to come raining down on him for the next decade. Roe bomaye! Roe bomaye! Roe bomaye! The King is here!
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Andrew Kreps Gallery (525 W 22nd St. Btw 10th & 11th Aves)
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