In the Beginning - Roe Ethridge

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.