“Images are redundant. I am becoming part of that redundancy.”
Roe Ethridge (Atlanta, US, 1969) presents himself without artifice or deception. Trained during a period in which photography was dominated by the Düsseldorf School, he began working with a systematic approach, consistent with the cultural environment in which he lived and studied. Over time, however, experience and practice led him to move away from a purely observational logic, drawing him instead into a hyperactive and hyper-productive mode of working—one that he counterbalances through numerically limited series of photographs, such as Shells, the fourth publication released by NoteNote.
Shells become both obsession and pretext: a means of reaffirming, with coherence, an ongoing practice of research and stimulation, infused with refined humor and irony. Always connected to episodes and memories—more or less latent—of his childhood, Ethridge undertakes a journey of memory to the house in Florida where he spent part of his youth, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. The shell becomes yet another excuse to invite the viewer on a personal journey, weaving together clichés of popular culture and free quotations from art history, blending and reinterpreting portraiture and still life.
The oyster becomes a fish with a—literally—glassy eye, a belly like a golf ball, and a single-use refreshing wipe as a fin; the lobster triumphs, quite literally, on a pedestal presenting an articulated and carefully composed arrangement of crustaceans set within a Renaissance-style table setting; or a small, common snail becomes the element through which to construct a frame—see, not see, overlap—of freely surrealist inspiration.
It is easy to speak of shells, seductive and multifaceted objects: home, container, memory, residue, skeleton. For Ethridge, they function as a mask—a way not to conceal but to partially obscure, allowing thought and memory, and therefore images, to flow freely. Whether common or precious, the shell becomes the perfect vehicle to stage constant movement, or rather the flow, of the world around us, and to represent a small yet symbolic fragment of its hyperkinetic and polymorphous nature.
Ethridge’s work does not separate the spheres in which images circulate whether in the form of an editorial product, a book, or a commercial project, the “voice” remains the same—a continuous questioning and self-questioning, rooted in the awareness that, paraphrasing the artist himself, sooner or later everything ends up published in a magazine. Far from being a value judgment, this observation speaks to authorship as, since the 1980s, an integral part of a process of technical, theoretical, and formal awareness, but above all of a system—the system of image production and creation—that is fundamentally autopoietic.
SHELLS, Roe Ethridge
Published by Note Note Editions
56 pages, 49 colour photographs
21 cm × 25.5 cm
Soft cover with a cut out in dust jacket
Edition of 1200 copies
ISBN 978-2-493467-08-9
Designed by Studio Mathieu Meyer
31/12/25
