Roe Ethridge's Rude In The Good Way is an unsettling view of America

(Image credit: Rude in the Good Way by Roe Ethridge, published by Loose Joints)

Picking up Roe Ethridge’s Rude in the Good Way, you’re instantly caught in the middle of a Southern shootout, Ethridge wielding his camera, while the subject, Lindsay, points a BB gun directly at you. The cover, conceptually, is a stroke of perfection, effectively eye-catching, surrounded by an air of danger. Yet, it's the visual imperfections of the photograph that stand out to Ethridge, who, video calling from his couch amidst the record-breaking New York City snowstorm, critiques, ‘it’s not lit right, it’s all kind of messed up. It feels like you’ve stumbled into something like, uh-oh.’

Rude in the Good Way

It’s that same intentional imperfection that has defined Ethridge’s nearly three-decade-long career and embodies the book’s title, a phrase that continued to come up throughout our conversation about the book’s contents: the B-movie CGI-inspired collages of Lindsay Lohan, thrown together as quickly as possible, were ‘rude in the good way.’ The confrontingly sexual paintings of John Currin, photographed during a 2008 studio visit on assignment for Artreview, were indeed ‘rude in the good way.’ The photographs, taken on his iPhone of the back of his camera, from a shoot where the original images had been lost, yet again, were ‘rude in the good way.’

As a child of the Reagan era, who spent his adolescence wanting ‘nothing more than to be a wholesome American good boy from the South,’ Ethridge’s interest in the imperfection of American life naturally arose once he left suburban Atlanta for college and began to critique that 'perfect' identity. His first three books, Orange Grove, Spare Bedroom and County Line – which have been compiled into a three-volume reissue titled In the Beginning to accompany the release of Rude in the Good Way – showcase his early explorations of American imperfection, from desolate strip malls to unloved orange orchards.

‘I recognise all the themes, the sense of colour and composition, they are still part of who I am now,’ he says of the books he originally self-published in the mid-2000s. Within the pages of Rude in the Good Way, you can see a direct through-line to that early work; the photographs of mouldy peaches are reminiscent of the mouldy oranges in Orange Grove, and an image of an open refrigerator feels like a contemporary sequel to his 1999 photograph, Refrigerator.

Coming four years after American Polychronic, a 400-page career retrospective, I was curious if it was difficult to begin another book after releasing what seemed to be the wrapping up of a lifelong body of work. ‘There's no finishing the book, but I do think that it did affect me. Having mid-career retrospective-type shows and books, there’s a kind of weird death feeling, where you’re stuck asking yourself questions like, ‘Am I Dead?’ ‘Is this over?’ But, it never is. You have to keep going and find what keeps you interested. That’s what this book is.’

Roe Ethridge, ‘Rude in the Good Way’ is published by Loose Joints, £43.00, loosejoints.biz