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

Roe Ethridge is one of those figures one cannot avoid when speaking about contemporary photography.

Among his publications, "Le Luxe" stands as a pivotal work that paved the way for new forms of photographic expression and significantly influenced many contemporary artists.

At the same time, it is also true that a growing generation can hear his name without feeling it resonate in any tangible way. It is hard not to sense the passage of time in that fact.

Reading it alongside Daniel Shea’s "Distribution", which I introduced recently, may allow us to reposition this book from our present vantage point. With that thought in mind, I sourced it again for the first time in several years.

Roe Ethridge, "Le Luxe"
MACK, 2012 (second edition)

This volume is the second edition of the photobook originally published in 2011 by the British publisher MACK. While the first edition was blue, this one wears a red cover.

Consumer society runs through Ethridge’s practice as a continuous theme. One could already say that the framework of his distinctive methodology had taken shape as early as "SPARE BEDROOM", self-published in 2004.

"Le Luxe", which reconstructs photographs made over roughly the previous decade, takes as its axis a commission he undertook between November 2005 and January 2010 to document architecture in central Manhattan adjacent to the World Trade Center. The book never explains this directly in words. As one navigates through its pages, the face of consumer and capitalist society ultimately emerges.

Here, Ethridge decisively crystallised an approach he had been intermittently testing, shaping it into a distinct style. By directly incorporating photographs and found images that appear detached from authorship, he also shook head-on the myths surrounding both “the artist” and “the artwork".

The commission work for urban documentation serves as the foundation of this book.

Ethridge intermingles commercial photographs he produced as part of his work with found images and ostensibly straight photographs, creating complex sequences that unfold across spreads.

If we borrow the perspective used recently when discussing Daniel Shea’s construction of sequence, the structure becomes clearer. By inserting commercial or art-coded images that seem to separate the flow from within, the book distances itself from any easy categorisation.

Is it documentary photography? Conceptualism? Contemporary art? It is now difficult to define using existing vocabulary. What the book demonstrates with clarity is the fact that the photographer’s activity has shifted from “recording” to operating within a vast field of images.

There have, of course, been many precedents for incorporating one’s professional output into artworks. Wolfgang Tillmans would be a prime example. Yet, in his case, even pictures made for magazines or situated within commercial contexts are enveloped by a powerful authorship that subsumes them as "Tillman's works."

Consequently, Tillmans's seal ultimately encapsulates everything, diluting the commercial scent.

Spread from the book "Truth Study Center" by Wolfgang Tillmans. A strong authorial presence pulls everything back into “the work".

What, then, about Ethridge?

He does not incorporate photographs into the narrative of an authorial myth. Rather, it would not be an exaggeration to say that he positions them within the mode of the commercial. Images recalling the rhetoric of fashion magazines or advertising, once displaced in context, begin to function as critiques of consumer society itself.

Fashion photographs remain fashion photographs; advertisements remain advertisements. Unlike Tillmans, authorship does not integrate them. Collision and rupture are exposed on the page as such.

This process is not a gesture of reconciliation between art and commerce.

It is the reality in which commercial imagery and artworks coexist without being separable. That, precisely, is contemporaneity, and this book reflects the current state of that image system with sharp clarity. The shift inverts the premise that value is guaranteed by the purity of authorship. At the same time, it reveals a society in which binary oppositions themselves are losing their efficacy. As heterogeneous images line up, even the reading of the central, supposedly "art", straight photographs changes in a chain reaction.

Furthermore, the analogue and the digital also coexist here without differentiation. Today's readers are likely to accept differences once perceived as ruptures without significant discomfort. There, we also observe an updating of interpretation that has occurred over time.

Spread from the book "Le Luxe"

The anti-heroic attitude Ethridge presented—a stance against the idealised image of the artist—provided a benchmark for photographic expression, particularly in the United States in the years that followed. Behind subsequent generations who address micro-politics and sociality while accepting the boundary between reality and fiction as a given, Ethridge’s shadow is unmistakably present.

The fascination of a classic lies in how its reading changes as time advances. Because a work endures transformation, it becomes a classic. Now, having passed through numerous social events and shifts in values, the position of this book has been updated as well. Returning to it, a different image emerges from the one we once saw.

This is exactly why I would like you to pick it up again, especially now after introducing Daniel Shea.

Article by Yukihito Kono (18 February, 2026)

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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

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