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Book Launch & Signing with Roe Ethridge
Next Friday, 23 January, at 8pm, we are pleased to invite you to the launch and signing of two new publications In the Beginning & Rude in the Good Way by Roe Ethridge, published by Loose Joints.
About Rude in the Good Way:
Rude in the Good Way Explores desire as both subject and method within Roe Ethridge complex visual bricolage of commercial glamour, errant snapshots, private sexuality and studio play.
Working through his characteristically oblique, off hand style, Ethridge lets sexuality, identity, seduction and the camera drift into the same plane, never fully separating one from the other. Loosely woven fugues of images converge, always cheekily winking toward something just out of frame: technicolor flash typologies of mouldy peaches, hyper-composite images of Lindsay Lohan, and Chanel still lifes both luxurious and lurid move alongside intimate, dressed-down snapshots of Ethridge’s collaborator Lulu Sylbert, unresolved glimpses into painter John Currin’s erotically charged studio, sarcastic self-portraits, and constant callbacks to the unmistakable image world Ethridge has built over the past twenty years, where photographs refuse to be pinned down or left unstimulated.
These fragments ask us, like the title itself, what is rude and what is not. A polished image, a casual glitch, a throwaway snapshot, a luxury still life, a screenshot from a weather station webcam? Ethridge sharpens his polychronic world to a point where desire, consumption and self-presentation overlap so completely that the photographs begin to test our own appetites: what we see, what we want and how we perform. First conceived as a companion to the 2026 reissues of his earliest books titled.
In the Beginning, Rude in the Good Way retains a mischievous echo of his earliest typologies and accompanies a solo exhibition at Gagosian Athens (22 January to 7 March 2026).
About In the Beginning:
Ethridge’s cult early studies of the American everyday return in a three-volume box set revealing the origins of his style.
Loose Joints is proud to present In the Beginning, a box set reuniting Roe Ethridge’s three formative, self-published books – County Line, Orange Grove and Spare Bedroom – originally released in 2004-05 and long out of print.
Across these early volumes, Ethridge stages a sharp, playful inquiry into the American everyday. From rotting Florida citrus orchards to half-built suburban interiors and the static hum of strip-mall signage, each book turns on a clear typological register, where the familiar slides easily into the strange.
Ethridge sets his pictures in a dialogue with photographic archetypes – catalogues, calendars, studio models, kitsch displays – using them to probe how images shape, naturalise and sometimes fracture American life.
Ethridge’s early books all emerge from loose typologies that, in their slippages, probe and complicate the aesthetics of American visual culture. From 2004, Orange Grove distills photographs made in a dilapidated Florida orchard into a study of slow collapse, a familiar symbol of American plenty quietly curdling at the edges.
Self-published simultaneously, 2004’s Spare Bedroom begins Ethridge’s career-long practice of jumbling and juxtaposing the commercial and the personal, in which an early commission for a furniture company unravels into a jagged mix of domestic scenes, catalogue imagery and loosely staged interiors.
Finally, County Line (2005) turns to the liminal spaces of Queens and Nassau County, abstracting the language of the strip mall into a concrete-poetry of word-photographs that sit against other images evoking the blurry edges of the suburban sprawl.
Taken together, the three books form a weave of contrasts, where moments of banality tilt towards the uncanny and the absurd. These early publishing experiments trace the emergence of Ethridge’s now-signature method: slanting, doubling and displacing images until they cohere with unexpected force or deliberately fall apart.
Nearly twenty years on, In the Beginning reads as a prefiguration of the more than fifteen books and catalogues that would follow. It marks the opening chapter of an artist who would go on to become one of contemporary photography’s most in fluential practitioners – revealing the restless, incisive eye that shaped everything to come.
In the Beginning is published to coincide with Roe Ethridge’s exhibition at Gagosian Athens (January 22 March 7, 2026).
About Roe Ethridge:
Roe Ethridge (b. 1969, Miami) lives and works in New York and is widely regarded as a leading figure in contemporary conceptual photography. Working fluidly between commercial and art contexts, Ethridge merges imagery drawn from fashion, advertising, and daily life with art-historical genres, using the real to suggest or disrupt the ideal. His photographs explore the increasingly porous boundary between the generic and the personal, and the way images gain new meaning through sequencing, recombination, and reuse.
Ethridge has published more than fifteen books, including American Polychronic (MACK, 2022), Neighbors (MACK, 2016), Sacrifice Your Body (MACK, 2014), Le Luxe (MACK, 2011), and Rockaway, NY (SteidlMACK, 2007). His commercial collaborations include major ongoing projects with Calvin Klein, Chanel, and Louis Vuitton.
His work has been exhibited widely in the United States and internationally. Significant solo presentations include Momentum 4, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2005); Charles Riva Collection, Brussels (2012); Le Consortium, Dijon, and M Museum Leuven (2012–13); and a major mid-career survey, Nearest Neighbor, at the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, for the 2016 FotoFocus Biennial. Ethridge was included in New Photography 2010 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and in the Whitney Biennial (2008). He was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize in 2011. Ethridge’s work is held in major public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Tate, London.
About Loose Joints:
Loose Joints is an award-winning independent publishing house based between Marseille and London, founded by Sarah Chaplin Espenon and Lewis Chaplin in 2014. Loose Joints collaborates with leading and emerging artists on contemporary approaches to photography in book form.
They circulate new visual perspectives through a dedicated list seeking to elevate underrepresented voices in photographic discourse. Our holistic approach to publishing allows us to work in close collaboration with artists from start to finish, with all design, editing and production done in-house. Loose Joints also operates independently as a design studio, working across publishing and the arts. Loose Joints is currently based in Marseille, where it also runs Ensemble, a bookshop and gallery dedicated to contemporary photography.