Le Luxe by Roe Ethridge

A photobook by American artist Roe Ethridge.

For this work, Ethridge adopts, as his title, the ironic French expression C’est pas du luxe (“it’s not a luxury”). The phrase hints that luxury is, by nature, superfluous, while at the same time declaring it to be somehow indispensable to life. Such paradox runs as a crucial element throughout Ethridge’s oeuvre, and Le Luxe encompasses a decade of his practice without falling into the heaviness often associated with retrospective surveys.

From private snapshots to magazine commissions and even archives of online screenshots, the book delves into a reservoir of heterogeneous images while further advancing Ethridge's investigation into image production in a way that almost refuses the very possibility of "finished work." In the idealistic era of digital photography, Ethridge has characterised himself as in a constant struggle with completion, echoing William Eggleston's observation. The “clean and perfect conditions” associated with photography are deliberately unsettled through the book’s material construction, forming a response to Henri Matisse’s apt warning that “exactness is not truth” (Matisse, notably, produced two paintings titled Le Luxe).

Structured in three parts, Le Luxe weaves the artist’s daily life into its singular backdrop. Between November 2005 and January 2010, Ethridge engaged in a single commission: documenting a building in central Manhattan adjacent to the World Trade Center. This narrative thread running through the book forms an uneasy equilibrium with the fissures that open between analogue and digital, as well as with Ethridge’s persistent drive to undermine his certainties.

Featured in The Photobook: A History, Volume III.

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Title: Le Luxe
Artist: Roe Ethridge
Publisher: MACK, September 2012
Format: Embossed hardcover
Size: 250 × 285 mm
Pages: 206 pages
Language: English
Edition: Second edition
ISBN: 978-1-907946-08-0

Book Review: From Subsumption to Coexistence—Roe Ethridge's "Le Luxe"