The Surfers Journal
Light / Dark
As a kid, Roe Ethridge watched another boy improvise with a modified BB gun. This was in Belle Glade, Florida, a tiny town along the southern rim of Lake Okeechobee that’s encircled by an ocean of sugarcane. They were down by the water, at the edge of an irrigation canal, when Ethridge’s friend took a chicken bone, placed it in the gun’s barrel, and took aim at an alligator.
Over the years, Ethridge would return periodically to Belle Glade, since it’s his parents’ hometown. Three decades later, during one of those visits, he ran into Chicken Bone Kid beside a canal again. By this point, Chicken Bone Kid had become Sheriff Chicken Bone, and Ethridge had become a photographer—as well known for his work in galleries as for the photos he made for editorial and commercial clients. Ethridge moved to New York City from Atlanta in the late 1990s and began showing his images in bound portfolios to art dealers, advertising agencies, and magazine editors. In 1998, he opened his first solo exhibition in the city at Anna Kustera.
A year later, Vince Aletti, a deeply respected cultural critic, nodded to Ethridge’s work in the Village Voice. In 2000, Ethridge garnered his first review in the New York Times, for his solo show at Andrew Kreps. Over the next few years, his work spilled out of the downtown galleries and grew into a practice that wed conceptual art and commerce.
In 2006, Gagosian, considered among the most prominent blue-chip galleries in the world, opened its first solo of Ethridge’s work, marking his ascension. Since then, he’s photographed covers for the New York Times Magazine, Texte zur Kunst, Aperture, GQ, CR Men, and Artforum. He’s shot campaigns for Hermès, Burberry, Chanel, Comme des Garçons, Goldman Sachs, and Telfar. He’s made portraits of Marc Jacobs, Pamela Anderson, Salman Rushdie, Danny McBride, LaKeith Stanfield, Karl Lagerfeld, and Anna Wintour. His photographs became album covers for Cat Power and Andrew WK. To date, he’s had 44 solo exhibitions and 92 group shows and has published more than 14 monographs.
In April of last year, spring coursed through New York City. Chartreuse leaves lent the trees a certain glow as I headed to Rockaway, where Ethridge has owned a home for two decades and recently moved full time. He appeared between two row homes, smiling, offering coffee, and putting together a plan to surf later (or possibly escape this interview). As long as I’ve known Ethridge’s work, I’ve always wondered if the self-aware, straightforward, and funny sensibility in his photographs was a reflection of his character. There were some photographs that were almost deliberately corny, photos that certain critics have dismissed as inside jokes. I had a feeling that wasn’t true, and I assumed the effect might come from an earnestness those writers didn’t like. Over the next few days, I tried to place whether that was accurate.
Ethridge was born in Miami in 1969, to a schoolteacher and an engineer for BellSouth. His family spent weekends out at Matheson Hammock or driving down to visit relatives in the Florida Keys. Free time was water time. Then, in 1979, they moved to Dunwoody, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta. Why do people live here? Ethridge asked himself. There is no ocean here. It makes no sense. It’s so far from the coast. What’s the point?
Soon after the move, the family took a vacation, pointing the car south to Florida’s panhandle. While walking the pier in Panama City Beach, a 10-year-old Ethridge heard a fisherman yell, “Shark!” He peered over the railing and saw a couple of surfers suspended in the water, who shouted back to the fisherman, “Fuck you!” Below them in the clear water, a giant hammerhead slid through the lineup as they bickered with the well-meaning angler. Something possessed Ethridge, because later he persuaded his parents to rent him a surfboard, a 9’0″ gun, that he took out into the Gulf and scratched around for windswell. “I don’t know why,” Ethridge remembers. “I was like, ‘No, this is what I need to do.’”
Back in Georgia, he wakesurfed behind boats in lakes and campaigned throughout adolescence for any vacation to be somewhere with waves. The rest of the time, his new surroundings in that slice of suburban, center-square America began to shape part of his aesthetic sensibility. The wallpaper in the house was “mind-bending—so ’70s,” he says, “but also, it just was very Southern. That really influenced me and how I see. The wallpaper is there.” The lattice of optical patterns, tigers and pumpkins and tulips, became like a lodestar, a central departure point for the photographs he’d make in the next three decades. He explained to me that he believes that when some people see a busy pattern like that, they think, Oh, that’s too much. But when he sees something like that, he thinks, Oh, that makes sense.
In Atlanta during the 1980s, there was a strange contrast of Reagan-era America, the counterculture of Southern hip-hop, evangelical opposition to drug use, RuPaul, and other beautiful things, like chicken and waffles. “Rah-rah!” Ethridge jokes about the atmosphere. He was in many ways a “good Southern boy,” a reflection of that place. He played football and attended church, but he also skateboarded and surfed. His father, a photographer, had books of Lee Friedlander’s work lying around. He recalls his mother chanting “Sacrifice your body!” from the bleachers at football games (although she now claims that’s not true).
Later, he toured with bands, studied for a time at Florida State University in Tallahassee, and then found himself back at the Atlanta College of Art, watching Twin Peaks every week in a film seminar. At that point, the concept of identity ran through almost every conversation in art school, and Ethridge asked himself, What the fuck am I? He went home and asked his parents, “What’s our deal?” He knew he was from southern Miami-Dade County, suburban Miami before Miami became “Miami,” and now of Atlanta, in some way. He was white, middle-class, and, as he puts it, “steamed broccoli.” But he wondered if that was it. There must be something else there.
After college, he found gigs in photography studios around Atlanta, largely shooting products for catalogs. There was a mercenary aspect to it: orienting a set of strobes, making quick work of dozens, sometimes hundreds, of products, and trying to make each photograph as smooth as the last. Outside the studio, Ethridge was beginning to make his own work, mostly several series of photographs that he described to me as “thesis based.”
In 1996, he moved to New York. During that first stretch in the city, he continued his thesis-oriented work, sticking to a subject, building a catalog of images around it, often with a large-format camera, and then making large-scale prints. One body of work was Neutral Ground, trees Ethridge found in the medians along the Jersey Turnpike or in east New York. At the same time, he was making that work for shows; he’d bound a portfolio of 16-by-20-inch prints and was carrying it around the city. Suddenly, something took root, and it led to his first solo with Andrew Kreps, the same gallery that still represents him a quarter century later. That show’s title foreshadowed Ethridge’s next two decades: Young Pines, Model Portraits, UPS Drivers, Ambulance Accident.
While assisting Philip-Lorca diCorcia, a photographer’s photographer who spanned the medium, on a commercial shoot in Oklahoma City, Ethridge asked him, “How do I do it? Tell me the secret.” DiCorcia put it simply: “You need to discover your voice and then use it.” The advice made sense to Ethridge immediately, but he thought to himself, What if you have more than one voice in your head?
At that point, photography was neatly defined by genres that in turn defined the photographer. Maybe you were an editorial photographer, known for exquisitely lit studio portraits made with a large-format Polaroid. Maybe you were a tenacious photojournalist, unafraid of violence. Or a slick conceptual artist. Or a commercial hand. But there wasn’t a wealth of people doing it all. Ethridge was looking back at Paul Outerbridge, Man Ray, Walker Evans, photographers who seemed to work across the medium, showing in museums, working for magazines and brands. Over time, he realized he wanted to do it all.
A clear turn came with an assignment from Allure to shoot a front-of-the-book makeup tutorial, a seemingly straightforward, conventional assignment. Ethridge remembers saying to himself, Great, I have no idea what I’m doing. The shoot called for a mix of models, still lifes, and an army of strobe flashes, and once he saw the prints, something clicked. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is what I’m going to do,’” he told me. “‘I’m going to do commercial stuff and sort of mix it with my art stuff, and we’ll see what happens.’”
He took the outtakes and planned to show them. He took outtakes from other assignments and did the same. “Suddenly,” he said, “it was open.” A thread formed throughout the work he made for brands and on assignment, as well as through the long-term projects he was developing for exhibitions. “That seemed to give me a lot of wiggle room.”
About the same time his career started to form in the late 1990s, he saw somebody with a surfboard on the L train in Brooklyn. He asked if it was a prop for a photo shoot, and the stranger told him no, he was headed to Rockaway to surf. “Like the Ramones song?” Ethridge asked.
He hadn’t surfed seriously since graduating high school, but that week he found a shop in Atlantic Beach in Nassau County, bought a board and a wetsuit, and ended up in good surf an hour from his apartment. He wondered, What the fuck is going on here?
He started learning the banks of the Rockaways, making the drive religiously. Soon, some friends told him, “You have to meet Charlie.” They meant Charlie Griffin, the printer who’d founded Griffin Editions and who would ultimately become one of the most well-respected printers in the city. Folks thought that Ethridge and Griffin would get along because they both surfed. They were right. (Ethridge and Griffin have worked closely together for the past two decades printing Ethridge’s work.)
By that point, Griffin was renting a third-floor apartment just across from one of the best stretches of surf in Rockaway. It was a sort of clubhouse to stash boards and wetsuits. Ethridge joined the lease, and in 2003 they bought the house together, still using it as a place to stash their boards and neoprene, but also as a retreat from the city.
It might seem silly to refer to Rockaway as a retreat, considering it’s only 10 miles from Midtown Manhattan, but it can feel wildly faraway, otherworldly, a rough-hewn, sometimes desolate place that, at the time, belonged to a much older version of New York City. The surf scene in the 1990s and early aughts reflected that, and there was lots of mystery left.
In 2012, Hurricane Sandy changed everything when it lashed the barrier island and, in its wake, reshaped the place with the sort of gentrification rife throughout the rest of the city. But, over the last 20 years, Rockaway has become something of a muse for Ethridge, who’s now spent hundreds of hours there with his family, traversing the strange beltway between Brooklyn and Cross Bay Boulevard.
The Rockaways and its history can appear grim at a glance, but it has its own sense of humor, too. (One house in Edgemere, for years, has had vinyl stickers on its fence excoriating the “sissy boys” who allow their dog to piss on the owner’s perennial flower beds.) It’s also a place celebrated for its sense of community, in and out of the water—both of which are constantly shifting with the sway of the Atlantic and Jamaica Bay. (Additionally, it’s the setting for a delicious myth about Duke Kahanamoku performing one of the first surfing demonstrations in America in 1912. Today, that site is an overgrown lattice of pavement that a pack of wild dogs once called home.)
For Ethridge, Rockaway was, in those early years, a good place to get away from the project-oriented work that had begun to feel “claustrophobic” and to slide into improvised work—not to mention a place to surf. In 2002, he married. By 2003, his photographs of pigeons in flight had appeared on the cover of Artforum, the same year he put down stakes in Rockaway. By 2005, a call from a director at Gagosian came. They asked him to mount a show in their Los Angeles space. He agreed, with one caveat: that Andrew Kreps would continue to represent him in New York alongside Larry Gagosian. That show, Apple and Cigarettes, opened in 2006 and galvanized his place among a new generation of photographers who were doing it all.
This past year, I drove with Ethridge as he headed into nearby Howard Beach to run an errand. Outside Petco, along Cross Bay Boulevard, he looked up at a marquee—a sequence of business names stacked vertically in black and white, unassuming pseudo-suburban camouflage. The signs punctuated the long line of strip malls that ran from the heart of Queens into the ocean. He looked up and admired it like it was a cherry sunset slowing the Earth’s rotation. “Nice sign,” he said before walking inside, where the song of parakeets washed over us.
To a Southerner, Howard Beach can seem alien. When I first moved to New York City from the South, I remember driving into Staten Island as a light snow fell, and I had never seen architecture like that before. It made me wonder if I’d made a mistake in moving. But, over time, you find things that remind you of home—like a strip-mall marquee.
In the first days of his move north, Ethridge felt homesick. He remembered fiddling with his antenna, scanning the television for a football game, finding Syracuse versus Rutgers, but no Southern teams. “That really drove it home,” he told me. As he thought back on his roots, he missed the slow pace, the way sentences glacially formed, and the vastness of the South. “You could really get lost,” he said later.
During that same time, he found himself in the pages of Walker Percy’s The Last Gentleman, a novel about a Southerner who moves to New York, feels haunted by his own past, and floats in and out of a fugue-like state. It was that notion of a fugue that stuck with Ethridge, who told me, “I don’t think I’d ever heard the word before.” He started reading about Bach, musical composition, and thought, This is exactly what I’m trying to do. The image sequencing, the books and stories—that was the place. What he meant was that the concept of the fugue helped him find the connective tissue between his work in all these different spaces.
The gallery shows were just 10 or 12 large-scale prints, but the books completed that entire composition with 60 or more images, often a strange coupling of commercial photographs, family portraits, and still lifes for brands alongside those made in his apartment. Chanel perfume occupied the same real estate as rotting fruit. A portrait of the model Hilary Rhoda in a Thanksgiving tableau could be followed by a still life of an ashtray and apples. The first image marshaled hundreds of hours in production, while the second took maybe five minutes to make. The space between them said a lot about the sort of work Ethridge was imagining. As he put it, “I would like [my work] to sound more like My Bloody Valentine than Tony Bennett.”
These days, if you get the chance to spend time with Ethridge’s monographs, you can get a bit dizzy with the jarring transition between sly portraits of Cookie Monster and then Western landscapes, or a conventional photograph that seems like a pastoral American image next to a crude collage of his own face superimposed over Patrick Swayze’s on the poster for Point Break. And clearly, that’s the point.
You’re getting everything from the highly controlled and polished studio environment to the straightforward photographs that either celebrate or poke fun at our idea of Americana. Usually you get both: irreverent celebrity portraits among those of his kids, an homage to David Lynch, an SEC football poster, montages assembled in the style of a coupon catalog. It often reflects the wry, self-deprecating, and, I think, refreshing sense of humor that Ethridge has. And that’s precisely what’s vexed some critics over the years.
In the New York Times, Martha Schwendener dismissed his work as “bro-conceptualism.” Other writers seemed to understand it, like Andrea K. Scott in the New Yorker, who wrote, “Political critique or pure coincidence? The brilliance of Ethridge is that the answer is yes and yes.” In the same magazine, Vince Aletti wrote of Ethridge’s recent monograph, “American Polychronic is full of photographs that slip among definitions and functions, refusing to be pinned down. If Ethridge wasn’t so good at this, he could be dismissed as a joker, a provocateur.”
In most cases, Ethridge’s photographs are not borne from some dense intellectual or theoretical framework but come to be simply because the light fell this way at this time on this thing. Some are candid, mementos from his personal life and career. The first photograph in American Polychronic is of his parents’ fridge, decorated with family photographs, letters, the wallpaper that shaped his aesthetic sensibility, and the Florida State football team’s mascot, historical Seminole leader Osceola. (It was actually an image from the cutting-room floor of a magazine piece that was killed in 1999.) The portrait of Rhoda came from his childhood memory of realizing at Thanksgiving dinner that he had a crush on his cousin. Most of his work bears some diaristic quality, a sort of code, whether the images were made for a company, an editor, or himself. That’s as earnest as earnest gets.
Sacrifice Your Body, another of his monographs and exhibitions, is a nod to the chant his and other parents shouted at his football games. It’s a body of work he made while visiting their hometown in Florida. On the second day, while traversing the Glades, which is how locals refer to this string of towns along the lake’s rim, he told himself that it was too fucking hot and he was too spent to get out of the car. The new plan was to make photos from inside the car. As he was driving down a vein of pavement that disappeared into a lime curtain of sugarcane, he saw a ribbon of black trailers marching off into the fields toward a sugar mill. He pulled over, tried to make an image from the window, but it didn’t work.
“‘I’m just going to get out of the car and take a picture, and then I’ll get back in the car,’” he remembers saying to himself. “So I set up the picture, click, and turn around, and the fucking thing [the car] is rolling past me. I had not put it in park. So now it’s lurching down the dirt berm toward an irrigation canal, and I’m chasing it. I got a hand on the door. I got it open, and I’m just about to jump in and try to stop it, and it just, whoa, dipped down another little berm, and I was like, ‘Fuck.’”
“It’s lurching down the dirt berm toward an irrigation canal, and I’m chasing it. And it just, whoa, dipped down another little berm. It turned out to be this great photo moment.”
The car spilled off the bank into the brown water and sank straight to the bottom while the windshield wipers moved back and forth. Eventually, a woman pulled up beside Ethridge, rolled her window down, and deadpanned, “You fucking put your car in a canal.” She told him to get in her car. He explained who he was, that his parents were from Belle Glade, and that his grandfather was James Ball Jr., hoping maybe she recognized the name. “Motherfucker,” she said quietly, before adding, “Well…call the sheriff.”
The squad car pulled up some time later, and as the sheriff walked up to Ethridge, he recognized the guy: Chicken Bone Kid, now Sheriff Chicken Bone. In fact, he’d had dinner with Chicken Bone’s father the night before, in Pahokee. “Just crazy,” Ethridge told me.
When they finally got a truck out to pull the car from the canal, the only thing Ethridge had with him was his camera, so he made a few images as they towed it out, turbid water streaming from the windows. “I told myself, ‘I better start taking pictures, because I’m going to have to buy this car,’” he said. One of the photos became central to Sacrifice Your Body and has reappeared in Ethridge’s work ever since. “It was clearly not intentional, but it turned out to be this great photo moment,” he said of the mistake.
Just past noon, we walked across the street from his house in Rockaway to check the surf. In the tin-colored light, an inviting sequence of peaks ran down the beach, with one completely empty. Coupled with the unusually warm weather, it was impossible to resist. Ethridge threw on a suit and riffled through a pile of boards in the basement, settling on a Takayama pop-out. The thing looked like a biohazard, and he joked how pissed off the righteous cast of New Yorkers would be to know this was his first choice.
But as he swung into a gorgeous right peak down the beach all alone, why would it matter what he was riding? He turned, let the board rise into a high line, and flew through the runner bending toward him. In one way, he is hyper aware of all the taboos and clichés he lives with—neurotically so. And yet it is that sort of care that allows him to make work that pokes holes in them, lends them a sense of humor, and, in this case, allowed him to surf one. It is all improvisation to him.
“This is the thing,” Ethridge told me later. “It truly is the joy of discovery for me. Now that I look back at it, I can see that I’m still cultivating an aesthetic. I had to go take the long route and make all the mistakes you could make, then be like, ‘Okay, some of those mistakes are good.’”
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