Eponanonymous

There has always been an elusive quality to Roe Ethridge’s exhibitions, a quality made all the more disorienting by the definitive clarity of his photographs.  In his current show at Kreps, Ethridge tightens the thematic reins but does not choke off the sense that the narrative may go careening away at any moment.

Photography (be it fine art, journalism, hobbyist, commercial, or so on) always seems to exist in modes:  there are broad categories, such as were just listed, but much more important are the modes existing on the “molecular level”, so to speak.  The modes tie one individual picture to another. The modes are what really allow viewers to make sense from a group of images.  So even when one enters a gallery and sees photographic content that is jarring or unexpected, in general the idea that the images hang together as a group is not at stake:  “a bunch of pictures of subject x” or “photos printed with technique y” or “images drawn from a cross-section of circumstances z.“  Each of those modes begins operating almost immediately, out of sight, out of mind.

Ethridge’s photos in “Rockaway Redux” ostensibly are governed by the pictures-thematically-evoking-a-place mode.  There are nautical knick-knacks, waves crashing on the boardwalk, sunsets, a crusty clown sailor.  And yet, making one’s way around the gallery, the sense of clarity so present in each image (both in a technical sense and in terms of confidence in the rightness of the image) gives way to uncertainty, first, then confusion, then disorientation.  One begins to think that “Rockaway” isn’t really the issue here; after all, there must be more direct ways to get at that than contrived still life shots, or sunsets from the Caribbean, or views of the Williamsburg Bridge.  The thematic mode threatens to give way to the horror vacui of the arbitrary. 

The press release for this show is a very winning example of the genre, insofar as it presents Ethridge’s own rationales for choosing each image in straight, simple language.  It is devoid of obfuscatory intent, or ironic detachment.  In the end it aligns with the general timbre of the show, which is a good faith effort to construct a narrative, in images, that can capture the cascading emotion initiated by the personal symbolic experience of a specific place.  The privacy of that experience can be difficult to penetrate, and that is reflected in this show; but that difficulty is not criticism of the show: in fact, one feels that the difficulty is an accurate view of the artist’s own experiences of the place and of putting together the narrative, and the inevitable influence those two things will have on each other.

So what of modes?  The most fascinating aspect of Ethridge’s work, broadly speaking, is his effort to stretch the molecules until they threaten to fly apart.  In so doing, the “connective tissue” of photography becomes the subject, and the tensile strength of our visual intelligence is put to the test.  This only works because of the gut-level instinct a viewer has that he is not being toyed with, that the effort is not one-sided.  The net result is not necessarily the unbridled visual pleasure that his individual images seem to offer, but something more displaced and complex, something taut in the psychic space between the frames.