Rude in the Good Way
In Rude in the Good Way, American photographer Roe Ethridge orchestrates a raucous collision between commercial glamour, stray snapshots, and frontal eroticism within an incendiary visual bricolage.
By Guénola Pellen. Photos by Roe Ethridge.
Roe Ethridge, born in 1969 in Miami, has worked for two decades between advertising commissions (Calvin Klein, Chanel, Louis Vuitton) and art projects. Here he stages a theater of desires where lush or lurid still lifes rub against paintings and vanitas in a deliberate confusion of genres.
Hyper-composite images of actress Lindsay Lohan speak to offhand shots of Lulu Sylbert, the writer and collaborator of Roe Ethridge, whose bare body shuttles between creative complicity and libidinal imagery. The couple thus probes the power dynamics inherent to erotic photography, as in Lulu in Green Lace and Fishnets (2025), where the staging mines pin-up codes.
The artist also tracks the erotically charged studio of painter John Currin, capturing unresolved fragments that collapse painting and photography into a meditation on romantic and artistic exchanges. His gaze examines those friction zones where commercial, editorial, and artistic imagery clash.
The book gathers sardonic self-portraits, weather webcam screenshots, and constant nods to the visual universe Ethridge has built over twenty years—a photographic world that shuns all categorization, where each fragment asks: what is rude, and what is not?
Take LU Cookie Half Melted (2025), where the sensuality of melted chocolate smeared across dark fabric, hovering between food porn and a wink to 17th-century still lifes and vanitas, sharpens our scopic appetite.
The photographer thus hones his universe to that critical point where desire, consumption, and self-presentation overlap so completely they blur into one. The image then wavers, tests our limits, probes what arouses us and what repels us.
Rude in the Good Way by Roe Ethridge is published by Loose Joints and available at the price of 46€.
The series accompanies a solo exhibition at Gagosian Athens, on view until March 7, 2026.
