Night with Roe Ethridge: Book Launch & Signing at Hyper Hypo

Hyper Hypo is launching two new publications by Roe Ethridge, In the Beginning and Rude in the Good Way, published by Loose Joints.

Rude in the Good Way explores desire as both subject and method within Roe Ethridge’s richly layered visual world where commercial glamour meets errant snapshots, private sexuality, and studio play.

Through his characteristically oblique, offhand style, Ethridge allows sexuality, identity, seduction and the camera to drift into the same plane, never fully separating one from the other. Loosely woven fugues of images converge, always cheekily gesturing toward something just beyond the frame: technicolor flash typologies of mouldy peaches, hyper-composite portraits of Lindsay Lohan, and Chanel still lifes at once luxurious and lurid, sit alongside intimate, pared-back snapshots of collaborator Lulu Sylbert, fleeting glimpses into painter John Currin’s erotically charged studio, sarcastic self-portraits, and constant callbacks to the unmistakable image-world Ethridge has built over the past twenty years—where photographs refuse to be pinned down or left unstimulated.

Like the title itself, these fragments invite the question: what is rude, and what is not? A polished image, a casual glitch, a throwaway snapshot, a luxury still life, a weather station webcam screenshot? Ethridge sharpens his polychronic universe until desire, consumption and self-presentation overlap so completely that the images begin to test our own appetites what we see, what we want, and how we perform.

First conceived as a companion to the 2026 reissues of his earliest books titled In the Beginning, Rude in the Good Way retains the mischievous spirit of his early typologies and accompanies Ethridge’s solo exhibition at Gagosian Athens (22 January – 7 March 2026).

About In the Beginning

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

Loose Joints is proud to present In the Beginning, a box 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 and 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 unfolds through a clear typological register in which the familiar slips easily into the strange.

Ethridge places his photographs in dialogue with recognizable image archetypes—catalogues, calendars, studio models, kitsch displays using them to examine how images shape, naturalise and sometimes fracture American life.

Orange Grove (2004) distills photographs taken in a dilapidated Florida orchard into a study of slow collapse: a familiar symbol of American abundance quietly curdling at the edges.
Spare Bedroom (2004), published simultaneously, begins Ethridge’s ongoing practice of mixing the commercial and the personal, an early furniture commission unravelling into a jagged montage of domestic scenes, catalogue imagery and loosely staged interiors.
Finally, County Line (2005) turns to the liminal spaces between Queens and Nassau County, abstracting strip-mall language into a kind of concrete poetry: word-photographs alongside images that evoke the blurred edges of suburban sprawl.

Together, the three books form a weave of contrasts, where banality tilts toward 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.

Nearly twenty years on, In the Beginning reads as a prefiguration of the more than fifteen books and catalogues that would follow, marking the opening chapter of an artist who would 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 (22 January – 7 March 2026).

About Roe Ethridge

Roe Ethridge (b. 1969, Miami) lives and works in New York and is widely regarded as a leading figure in contemporary conceptual photography. Moving fluidly between commercial and artistic contexts, Ethridge merges imagery drawn from fashion, advertising and everyday life with art-historical genres, using the real to suggest—or disrupt—the ideal. His work explores 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 US and internationally. Significant solo presentations include Momentum 4 (ICA Boston, 2005); Charles Riva Collection, Brussels (2012); Le Consortium, Dijon and M Museum Leuven (2012–13); and Nearest Neighbor, a major mid-career survey at the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, for the 2016 FotoFocus Biennial. He was included in New Photography 2010 at MoMA, New York, and in the Whitney Biennial (2008), and was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize in 2011. His works are held in major public collections including MoMA, the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, MOCA Los Angeles, and Tate.

ROE ETHRIDGE WILL BE WITH US FOR THE LAUNCH AND SIGNING.