ROE ETHRDIGE INTERVIEW WITH KEVIN MOORE

KEVIN MOORE: In the ten years that I have knownRoe’s work, I've seen a lot of different kinds of complexityin terms of image manipulation, and differentkinds of subject matter and things that not that manypeople were doing then; it felt to me like a kind of freshand confusing and experimental approach to makingphotography, especially at that time. And in terms of thebooks–Le Luxe and Sacrifice Your Body–they strike meas being much more complicated in some ways than thenew one, Shelter Island. Thus I feel like I’m seeing somethingthat looks a bit like, maybe, a return to making beautiful strong images that are edited concisely, perhapsin a more traditional way. Shelter Island doesn’t feel, tome, like it wanders too far out of bounds. It has a kindof concision to it, almost like a gallery show. Maybe youjust want to start by talking about how you got from theseemingly more complex projects to this approach toShelter Island?

ROE ETHRIDGE: I think that for about fifteen yearsI was working in what I liked to call a fugal mode, orplaying off both the notion of the musical fugue, whichis this harmony, disharmony, multiple voices, washingover each other as well as a medical condition where youbecome amnesiac. When people go into a fugue state,they wind up doing these far flung travel things andcome back to consciousness in another place and don’treally know why. And when I first moved to New York,I didn't have that in mind but I started getting commercialassignments and was also working on my shows atthe same time. My mentor Philip Lorca deCorcia toldme, “You gotta find your voice, you know, use yourvoice–learn to use your voice.” My first thought was like,“Well, I have more than one voice, so...” Not necessarilyschizophrenic, but it was that idea of, like, my identitywasn’t totally locked into one perspective. It was somethingwhere it could be something multiple.

KM: It seems like a very psychological and personal responseto the state of photography, in a way, where it isstill split between people who do commercial or editorialand people who make art.

RE: That’s true but, for me, I think it was hard to denythat my projects, which would start with what I thoughtwas conceptual photography, where it had a thesis tostart and then would illustrate that thesis with images.By the time I would get to the end of a project, I felt sotired and it felt false in a way, and yet, at the same time,I was shooting something like a beauty image for Alluremagazine, and looking at this Polaroid from the shoot,and thinking, “This is the best picture I've taken in amonth or two.” And then came this notion of a contaminationor pollution of this pure conceptual projectwith the random effects of making yourself available forassignment photography. That’s when that started tohappen, and the challenge was to simultaneously itemizethis notion of the image while also not losing myselfsomehow, or keeping that voice thread throughout.

KM: Would you say, then, you found the voice throughgoing out of bounds with these expectations of theconceptual project? You seem to me to have an urge topervert these expectations in a certain way.

RE: Yeah, I suppose so. I mean, it definitely was comingout of that fugal idea–counterpoint is key to that idea interms of the musical form, and that just made so muchsense to me as this artist, you know. Or like I said, “I ama photographer living in New York in the 2000s,” andthat's my truth or something.

KM: A lot of photographers—Taryn Simon as an example—she is very tight with her concept. She sets atopic, researches it, determines the format, and sheexecutes it. And I think you have this urge always to tryto invent new forms, to throw in something confusingor unexpected. It's either a personal thing or maybe it isan art position: riding the line between something that’scomprehensible and incomprehensible.

RE: Well, I think it was important to me to try to unnamethe thing, and de-caption the image. In the caseof Taryn’s work, the caption is just as important as theimage, classification and terminology. In my case, Ifeel like the split personalities between the shooter, theperson who authors the image and the editor. You know,from working in magazines and seeing how fucked upyour shit can get by an editor. I thought, “Wow, that'sa lot of power,” and it determines the reception of theimage, and it's almost like it’s really half the voice. So,for me, there was something that I could play with: thepower, the structure and also seeing how things juxtaposedsuddenly created this meaning for me that wasbetter than my intended thing. If I had a great idea, itoften started to look worse and worse as these juxtapositionscame together. There's the world—the model andthe UPS drivers—the delivery system with a representationof the product.

KM: It’s a way of making new connections. I’m oftenstruck by what's allowed in painting. I was at the AlbertOehlen exhibition at the New Museum and, reading thewall label, I was thinking to myself that the descriptioncould almost apply verbatim to your work–working indifferent vocabularies and all these things–but it struckme, though, that in photography there’s so little acceptanceof that. There’s still this determination to makesure that a photographic series or what an artist is doingis comprehensible in some very traditional documentarystyleway. Your work, I think, is very hard for some inthe photographic community to understand becauseit really speaks more in a vocabulary or language ofcontemporary art, more generally, not specific to photography.Do you think about what artists in other mediumsare doing?

RE: I never wanted to make movies but I did want tomake paintings, but that seemed like it was going to taketoo long, and then it turned out it takes just as long tobecome a good photographer as a good painter. I think,in some ways, some part of it was that I loved the waypainters used the edge of the frame, the full composition.In school I was doing things like sandpapering postersand you know, doing things that were ready-mades ofsorts, and thinking that all the good pictures had alreadybeen taken, so now I have to deconstruct, take this thingapart. And then I started shooting four-by-five, and thatchallenge with the craft, with the medium, was inspiring.And then being able to bring these other things into thefold, and influences like, you know, Cindy Sherman, ofcourse, you could say Jeff Koons and Richard Prince…I want to make compositional images.

KM: I think what's interesting is that you take very goodtraditional pictures. You can take a picture that looks likea Man Ray or something that has that kind of force, butyou're not treating it as a kind of precious thing and youdon't obey those Modernist rules. You can be very experimentalwith the process and very irreverent about theprint and about the way you combine prints and such.Let’s talk about some specific pictures.

RE: The portrait of Louise Parker was for a magazine,but I cut her out very crudely, and dropped her portraitinto a screenshot from the Google street view of thesuburban home I grew up in Atlanta. That Google streetview is the last image in the Sacrifice Your Body book,and so for me that was a way to tangentially connectthat body of work with the next group of pictures, whichwas called Double Bill with Andy Harmon and specialguest Louise Parker–I just wanted to make a TV varietyshow title, you know? For me this had a lot to do withmy affection for my set and prop guy, Andy Harmon.It is actually a very seemingly conventional, almost arthistoricalimage, and I also started bringing in these gridforms so that it was like a throwaway, like worse thanan outtake. It wasn’t anything, but I also liked how Ibrought that Tiffany blue into the background and therewas a language about it that was different and felt right.This is a picture at Andy’s studio. I went over and spentan afternoon taking pictures of whatever was there asanother way to get to that multiple perspective.RE: This is a picture inside my studio. I had just gottenthis test print back and I started printing on dye-sublimation.It’s on a coated sheet of aluminum and theEpson transfer print comes reversed and gets laid downon the dye-sub aluminum. It has this kind of weird HDquality to it. It’s not like 3D, but it’s kind of cheesy andconsumer, and it’s kind of wrong. But when I got thiseight-by-ten sample, I just was so excited I took it ››Roe Ethridge, Louise with House, 2014 around the studioand made little still-lifes around it,so this is an example of finding the accident, lettingthe wrong thing be the right thing and being inspiredand allowing things in to the body of work that are absolutelyunintended. In this case, this particular piecewas the first one that we made. My assistant Josef hadhis Photoshop document, he had every layer open,so it turned into this fucked up compressed thing onthe screen that was just like, a jam there, and later on,we added these backplate images of the pickle and thesalmon roe, bringing all this random stuff and juxtapositioninto a single frame, but doing it exactly wrong.

KM: It has, to me, the feeling of surrealist collage, avery contemporary form of collage. Collage is making acomeback as I think we're so used to seeing collages onour computer screens, as we seem to always have likefive or eight windows open at the same time.

RE: Right. I was standing in front of the print in thestudio and looking at my iPhone. And I realized “Damnit, it’s the damn iPhone.” But there was something aboutthat vernacular internet brochure kind of design–I enjoy,you know, making bad design choices and there wassomething about hyperbolizing that vernacular that wasappealing.

KM: It looks to me like a familiar object—a computerscreen or an iPhone screen—but you’ve sent it into afugue state. It has a kind of sensuality to it, and I thinkyour choices are not simply to make the point intellectuallybut it’s more about this looking really interesting andamazing; it comes from a very visual place.

RE: But it’s also, for me, it’s also like a desperate place becauseI didn't want to uninclude, edit out these pictures.I wanted to have something, but instead of it expandingout into the space, it was compressed into that screen,the, sort of, frame that can contain.

KM: Back to Shelter Island. The cover has a strong pictorialquality that’s almost kitsch but at the same timebeautiful.

RE: Kind of like an elevator button.

KM: Taking you to that good place.

RE: Or down to the bad place. Shelter Island was shotover the month of August on the actual Shelter Island.This was the third year we had rented this house–it’s oneof those American kit houses, a Sears house from earlyto mid 20th century, that you ordered and it was deliveredand it got put together on site. And the family thatowns it has kids who are in their twenties and so the garageis full of objects from infancy through adolescence,all the summer things that you want. So it was like aprop house for my enjoyment, and a set as well.

KM: Maybe this is a place to emphasize that you’remaking images that some critics have described, negatively,as glossy. They’re beautiful, but they have a slickadvertising look to them, although you’re also absorbingsomething very personal and sentimental in terms ofsubject matter. Your process is very involved with peoplewho matter to you and so even though the product issomething that looks like advertising, the content of it isactually really traditional and personal in many ways. Iwas thinking about the fact that advertising photographyused to look so different from the kinds of pictures thatwe all take on our iPhones and post on Instagram, andI think in some ways, we’ve all become kind of professionalphotographers, and at the same time, professionalphotography looks more ordinary or something. Howdo we salvage our identity within that? We’re all lookingat our personal stuff in very slick, professional formats.Maybe you’re doing what a lot of us have to do in oneway or another, where we retrieve something from thedistribution and production of images that we’re all participatingin all the time.

RE: Initially, I thought that this Shelter Island book wasjust going to be pictures of Nancy, my wife, and then ittook a turn more into this narrative thread of end-ofsummermalaise, but it’s also the family portrait–I lovethose Alex Katz paintings, you know. So it was kindof like those things mixing together and all that vacationheat and saltwater. And while I wanted to makepictures of my family, I also wanted to find that “slickcommercial.” In some ways, I feel like in every portraitin the book, the figure has a mask or some mediation,some way to distance you from them and not them yourpersonal story, and it becomes a play between, “Is this aformal image or is this telling us something?”

KM: There’s a weird difficulty in making a picture that isbasic—the deskilled image.

RE: In my order of how images get made, I am remindedof the ubiquitous subjects I grew up with in Miami—theconch shell as subject—certain subjects like shells orflowers or sunsets are hard to take pictures of.

KM: James Welling took on the flower series as a challenge–how can you actually make a rigorous picture offlowers because it’s such a distracting, beautiful, kitschsubject?

RE: This is the one disruption inside of the Shelter Islandsequence. It’s Pamela Anderson eating grapes that Ishot for Gentlewoman and it was a picture that I reallyloved and wanted to use it, but couldn’t figure out why.Then this fall I was in London and I went to the WallaceFoundation, which is amazing. They have all this 18thand 19th-century French art, and they have these figurinesthat represent the seasons, and there’s a figurineeating a grape, and I realized I inadvertently referencedthat picture, but it works so perfectly with Pamela asthe Tool Time kind of a girl, but also beckoning in theharvest season and the end of summer. It’s a little hard totell that it’s her because you don't see that frontal view,but I just really love that, her sort of slightly disruptinginstead of [furthering the narrative].

KM: It’s a kind of a fantasy of a bounty in the middle ofwhat I think is otherwise a kind of melancholy series.As you proceed through the pictures, it’s that fadingof summer, the fleetingness of it. The picture of driedflowers…

RE: And empty Coke bottles. This is the kind of stuffthat’s in this house, and I’d been looking at it for threesummers. It was like with the weeds that I was saying,there’s something that I felt I really needed to apprehend–images of things that were close at hand, and thatdidn’t involve ambition. So the shell, the flowers, theCoke bottles, the empty vessels, this kind of thing justkept coming back.

KM: Something you and I talk about sometimes is theway we both want to evade the existing categories, oravoid to using the word archive, for example. We callyour work inventory. If we were jumping onto this artjargon bandwagon, we would be sitting here talkingabout archive and index and things like that.

RE: It made so much sense to me because of the relationshipwith commerce that photography has and I have asa photographer, and the way these images were beingdeployed.

KM: Inventory is dynamic in a way that an archive isn’t.An archive is boxed up.

RE: Well, inventory is The Gap. And an archive is like,you know, art school, and, you know, German things,and The Bechers.

KM: Should we answer some questions from the audience?