Roe Ethridge on the beauty and perversity of Americana

Who is that girl? A face appears repeatedly in Roe Ethridge’s photographs. The woman is youthful and expressive, striking without eccentricity. The sort of girl that Jeffrey Eugenides might have immortalised in fiction. Her name is Louise Parker, and she embodies the kind of beauty you’d see over a picket fence, through a bedroom window, or in a yearbook photo pinned to the fridge.

Parker first met Ethridge on a shoot for Double Magazine in 2010, and the two have been friends and collaborators for the past decade and a half. In her face, Roe saw the revival of the suburban American environment he grew up in. This nebulous, subjective description of American life is essential to Ethridge’s work. ‘Happy Birthday Louise Parker II’, a survey show spread across Gagosian’s locations in Gstaad and London, archives both the beauty and perversity of Americana.

Parker was a street cast. She hadn’t modelled before, but – Ethridge calls me from his home in Far Rockaway, New York – she knew exactly who he was: “It became this kind of immediate, collaborative process…she knew what was cooking”. Parker was studying at Bard College under veteran American photographer Stephen Shore at the time, “she knew a lot,” says Ethridge. This was not your traditional photographer-muse relationship. Louise knew what Ethridge was trying to achieve from the get-go; she identified him with what was starting to be labelled “the new school of synthetic photography” in the late 2010s.

“It’s intended to be modular,” Ethridge tells me of his exhibition, “especially the commercial works”. In London, Duck for Burberry (2023) and Candy and Comme des Garçons (2024) could easily be replaced for another of Ethridge’s sleek promotional pieces (he’s previously shot for Chanel, Tiffany, Louis Vuitton). The exhibition is an interplay of genres: brand photography, editorial campaigns and documentary images. ‘Happy Birthday, Louise Parker’ blurs the line between right and wrong, documentary and constructed, subject and object. In Ethridge’s hands, photography is several degrees separated from the real.

Louise on David’s Refrigerator (2012-2020) is a pretty meta image. It’s an invitation poster for a show called ‘Le Luxe’ that Ethridge did for Goldmann-Sachs in 2010. It’s an image of Louise in a yellow bathing suit, which “got pretty dinged up, pinned to a refrigerator for ten years with a dragonfly clip”. Roe describes that his friend David –“it doesn’t matter who David is” – sent him a photo of the photo. The image in ‘Happy Birthday Louise Parker II’ is a printout of the original file David sent. Ethridge could have shown the original print, but he chose the image in its domestic setting, marked by time, beaten up and part of what Ethridge calls “using the image as an object”.

Ethridge’s penchant for meta-framing past works also has a technical aspect. His preferred printing method allows him to create “camera collages”. For the past ten years or so, his process has been to print through a process of dye-sublimation. This involves printing not onto paper but onto coated aluminium. The product is a thin, rigid print that can be placed anywhere.

This method allows for images such as Louise with Still Life (2014), a photo of Parker against the background of the American flag, to act as a prop within a still life. The image sits atop a super-varnished light wood cabinet surrounded by a tacky Halloween skull, a plastic water bottle and a dated landline—remnants of domestic American life. At first glance, it looks like a portrait on a funeral casket, a vanitas image with a plastic memento mori. It’s not death that occupies the photo, it seems, but innocence lost to adolescence. Parker’s role in the still life is spectral, making clear what Roland Barthes states in Camera Lucida: “The photograph always carries its referent with itself”.

When asked about a closely cropped image of a car pulled from a river, Durango in a Canal, Belle Glade, FL (2011), the artist has a description ready: “The car is a soccer mom type car…it’s an ordinary American mom vehicle”. The disrupted quotidian of a suburban car toed from murky water creates a new “genre” for the artist, akin to 70s film noir: “It’s an example of a juxtaposition that creates its own third sound”, he says.

The strain to protect the ordinary is at the heart of American culture, immortalised in films like American Beauty (1999) and Election (1999). With its emphasis on food (orality) and the nuclear family (Freud), Ethridge’s work is a psychoanalyst’s wet dream. In fact, for American Polychronic, the first comprehensive catalogue of the artist’s work (Mack, 2022), the renowned analyst Jamieson Webster contributed an essay on desire, repulsion, hysteria and mysticism. Ethridge, too, discusses Americana in terms of the repressed: “The middle class in America are not boring. Everyone has complex stories. Americana was a way to use that feeling of being trapped in the suburbs as a teenager”. He celebrates his influences, Alex Katz and Lee Friedlander, for the “ordinariness” of their subjects. The droll American character, think Jeffrey Beaumont in Blue Velvet (1986), became an avatar for Ethridge. As an artist, Ethridge is refreshingly open to Freudian readings of his work; “As a subject matter, as a place to come back to, it’s not always Americana. It’s mom, you know, it’s your mother”.