Roe Ethridge - In the Beginning

Ethridge’s cult early studies of the American everyday return in a three-volume set revealing the origins of his style.

Loose Joints is proud to present In the Beginning, a three-volume 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 withering on the tree. 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.

Reissued twenty years later, 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 influential 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) and is published simultaneously with Rude in the Good Way.

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

Three facsimile volumes with card insert and rubber band

County Line: 36pp, section-sewn softcover, 200 x 250 mm
Spare Bedroom: 88pp, section-sewn hardcover, 200 x 250 mm
Orange Grove: 16pp, stitched booklet, 200 x 250 mm

Published by Loose Joints, February 2026
LJ218, ISBN 978-1-912719-71-6

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