Le Luxe ─ Roe Ethridge

A photobook surveying a decade of Roe Ethridge’s image-making through a restless coexistence of the personal, the commercial and the unfinished.

Le Luxe is a photobook by American artist Roe Ethridge. Taking its title from the ironic French expression C’est pas du luxe (“it’s not a luxury”), the book turns on a paradox central to Ethridge’s practice: that luxury may be superfluous by nature and yet somehow indispensable to life. Encompassing a decade of work without assuming the weight of a conventional retrospective, the book moves between private snapshots, magazine commissions and online screenshots, drawing heterogeneous images into a structure that continues Ethridge’s investigation into image production while resisting the very idea of a definitively “finished” work. The clean, perfected conditions often associated with photography are further unsettled through the book’s material construction, recalling Henri Matisse’s warning that “exactness is not truth.”

Structured in three parts, Le Luxe also weaves the artist’s daily life into its singular backdrop. Between November 2005 and January 2010, Ethridge was engaged in a long-term commission to photograph a building in central Manhattan adjacent to the World Trade Center, and this thread runs through the book in uneasy balance with the fissures opened up between analogue and digital, certainty and doubt. Featured in The Photobook: A History, Volume III, the publication remains one of the clearest expressions of Ethridge’s singular ability to let disparate image worlds coexist without resolution.

Book Review
From Subsumption to Coexistence—Roe Ethridge’s Le Luxe
by Yukihito Kono

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