summer vacation 3d

- good evening, everyone. my name is steven frailey. it's my great pleasureto be the chair of the undergraduate of photographyand video department here at good ol' school of visual arts. glad to have you here. this, this event this evening is part of an ongoing effortof dear dave magazine, a magazine that is devotedto photography and writing

and of which i am the editor-in-chief. it's an ongoing effortthat we put together of conversations between prominent photographers and writers,critics, curators. it's good to have you here. if you're interested inbeing on the mailing list, please let us know. we'll take your emailaddress out in the lobby where we also are selling copies

of the magazine at adiscounted rate of $5. kevin and roe are going totalk for about 45 minutes. there will be some questions and answers. roe will be signingcopies of his new book, which will also be availablefor sale after the talk. we also have a bit ofchampagne for your pleasure that i hope you can stay for. in the meantime... sorry.

in the meantime, allow me to introduce kevin moore and roe ethridge. kevin moore is an independent advisor, curator and writer based in new york. since 2013, he's beenthe artistic director and curator of photofocus, a cincinnati-based non-profit specializing inphotographic programs and events. he is organizing theupcoming solo exhibition roe ethridge, "nearest neighbor", at the

contemporary art centerin cincinnati as part of the fotofocus biennial of 2016. roe ethridge has recently exhibited work at the barbara gladstonegallery in brussels and has been represented by the andrew krepps gallery since 2002. his work has been showed extensively in institutions around the world, including moma ps1, thebarbican center in london,

the carnegie museum of art, the institute ofcontemporary art in boston, the whitney biennial, the museumof modern art in new york, the metropolitan museum in new york, and the hammer in los angeles. i'm sure i've left out a few. in 2011, he was shortlistedfor the deustche borse. is that right, roe, borse? deutsche borse?

okay. deutsche borse prize. finally, his work has been commissioned by id magazine, interview, w magazine, dazed and confused,balenciaga, kenzo and chanel. so, without further delay, please welcome - thank you. just to start that, iguess the 10 or so years i've been paying attention to roe's work,

i've seen a lot of different kinds of complexity in terms of image manipulation, and different kinds of subject matter, a lot of things that, you know, starting 10 years ago, notthat many people were doing. it felt to me a kind of, a very sort of fresh and confusing,experimental, you know, approach to making photography,especially at that time. and i think in terms of the books

that i've seen roe produce, the looks and sacrifice your body, most recently, these books strike me as being much more complicated in some ways thanthe new one, shelter island. and i feel like i'm seeing here something that looks a bit like,maybe a return to order, a return to making beautifulstrong images that are edited concisely, maybe in amore traditional way. the book itself doesn't feel, to me,

like it wanders too far out of bounds. it has a kind of concision to it, almost like a gallery show. so maybe you just wantto start by talking about sort of how you got fromthe more complex projects to this approach to shelter island. - yeah, i think that for about 15 years working in this, i was working in

what i liked to call, sort of, fugal mode or playing off both the notion of the musical fugue, which is this sort of harmony, disharmony, multiple voices, washing over each other as well as a medical condition where you sort of have an amnesiac... you know, period oftime where you sort of, people when they go into a fugue state,

wind up sort of doing thesefar flung travel things and sort of come to, orcome back to consciousness in another place anddon't really know why. and when i first moved to new york, i felt like there was something, you know. i didn't have that in mindwhen when i came to new york, but i started gettingcommercial assignments and was also working onmy shows at the same time, and there was somethingabout these, this feeling

of, you know, it was like, my mentor, philip lorda de gosche told me, you know, "you gotta find your voice,you know, use your voice. "learn to use your voice." and my first thought was like, "well, i have more than one voice, so." not necessarilyschizophrenic, but it was like that idea of, like, my identity wasn't totally locked into one perspective.

it was something where it couldbe something multiple, and-- - it seems like a verypsychological personal response to the state of photography, in a way, where it is still, in alot of ways, split between people who do commercial or editorial and people who make art. - that's true, but, you know, for me, i think it was hard to deny that my projects, which would sort of start

in a conceptual, what i thoughtwas conceptual photography, you know, where it's like itsort of had a thesis to start and then would illustratethat thesis with images. by the time i would getto the end of a project, i felt so, sort of, tiredand it felt false in a way, and yet, at the same time, iwas something shooting like a beauty image for allure magazine, and you know, looking atthis polaroid from the shoot, and thinking, like,"this is the best picture

"i've taken in a month or two months." i can't just let it kindof go by the wayside, and then this notion ofa sort of contamination or pollution of thispure conceptual project with the random effects of making yourself available for assignment photography. that's when that started to happen, and you know, in some ways, it was, the challenge was tosort of simultaneously

itemize this notion ofthe image while also not losing myself somehow,or keeping that voice a thread throughout, and sothat was sort of the guiding-- - would you say, then, youfound the voice through going out of bounds with theseexpectations of, you know. you have a conceptual project,you fill in the blanks, you make the pictures, but, you know, you seem to me to have an urge to, you know, to pervert to these expectations

in a certain way. - yeah, i suppose so. i mean, it definitely was... you know, coming out of that fugal idea, the sort of counterpointis key to that idea in terms of the musicalform, and that just made so much sense to meas this artist, you know, or like i said, "i am aphotographer living in new york "in the 2000s and that's mysort of truth or something."

so how do i do that? and, you know, in doingso, it's sort of like, it had to be distorted orperverted or, you know, i couldn't take a position of, you know, this is my thing or, youknow (clears throat). and... - i mean, you see a lot of photographers, not just you, taryn simon as an example as we were mentioningher, and she just opened

her show, who's verytight with her concept. she's scientific, almost. she sets a topic. she researches it. she determines the format,and she executes it. - right. - and i think you have this urge always to try to invent new forms, try to throw in somethingconfusing or unexpected.

it's either a personal thing or it's maybe something you feel it has to do, like, what's availableto do right now in terms of positions in art and photography. people work in series andsystems and all of that, and there are very commonpredictable ways of doing that. so, but i what i see you doing there is over and over again, issomething that continually sort of, you know, rides the line between

something that's comprehensibleand incomprehensible. - well, i think it was important to me, even though i wasn't surewhy, to try to unname the thing, and decaption the image, and i think, in the case of taryn's work, it's the opposite. it's, you know, the caption is just as important as the image. - classification and terminology

are important to her.- [roe] the text. you know, it's equal, and in my case, i feel like the split personalities between the shooter, theperson who authors the image or, you know, is like,in the external world, making an image is just as important as the editor, and i think, that you know, from working in magazines and everything and seeing how fucked up yourshit can get by an editor.

- for writers, too. - yeah, for sure, and so, you know. i was like, "wow, that's a lot of power." and it determines how thereception of the image, and it's almost like it'sreally half the voice. so, for me, there was somethingthat i could play with that structure, thepower of that, and also, you know, seeing howthings juxtaposed suddenly created this meaning for me that was,

again, it was betterthan my intended thing, and so, you know, if i had a great idea, often times, it startedto look worse and worse as these juxtapositions,like, came together, and it was like, there's the world. the model and the ups drivers and, you know, the sortof delivery system with representation of, like, the product. it was like, and here i am,complicit in this thing,

which, like, for better orworse, it's what i want to do. but so does she, and so does this guy. so it was almost like a, it felt like a naturalstumbling into something, but it was also-- - it's a way of making new connections, and i'm often struck by sortof what's allowed in painting. like i was at the oehlen,albert oehlen exhibition at new museum, and iwas reading the voluble

and i was thinking tomyself that the description could almost apply verbatimto your work, you know, like working in differentvocabularies and all these things, but it struck me, though,that in photography, there's so little acceptance of that. i mean, there's stillthis kind of determination to make sure that a photographic series or what an artist isdoing is comprehensible in some, very traditionaldocumentary-style way.

you know, not to dissanybody, but alec soth, for example, does itvery well, does a very traditional documentaryproject series kind of work. he takes great pictures, but you know, that's in some ways, i think what the photo communitystill really wants, and meanwhile, you know,your work, i think, is very hard for themto understand because it really speaks more ina vocabulary or language

of contemporary art, more generally, not specific to photography. do you think about what artistsin other mediums are doing? or are you really, i see, ithink you're very involved with photography more or less, i mean. - yeah. - when you talk to students,you talk very technically about what you're doing. i think it's often drivenfrom a very tech place.

- yeah, i mean, i think it's a... it is. you know, i never wanted to make movies. i did want to make paintings,but that seemed like it was going to take toolong, and then it turned out, it takes just as long tobecome a good photographer as a good painter, and,or you can get good random results either way. but, yeah.

i think, in some ways,some part of it was like i loved the way paintersused the edge of the frame, the full composition. i loved matisse and all overpattern, pattern decoration, and so when i was in school, i was sort of coming in through that, youknow, just out of curiosity, coming through that placeback into the image. 'cause i've sort of feltlike, i was doing things like sandpapering posters andyou know, doing things

that were ready-made ofsorts, and thinking, like, "you know, all the good pictureshave already been taken, "so now i have to deconstruct,take this thing apart." and then i started shooting four by five. i was like, "this is reallyfucking hard, you know?" and that challenge withthe craft, with the medium, was inspiring, and thenbeing able to bring these other things intothe fold, and, you know, influences like, you know,cindy sherman, of course,

but, like, you could say jeff koons. i love jeff koons. richard prince, the girl next door. when the light went on,that was something, like, it made all kinds of sense,and at the same time, i didn't feel like, "well,i want to use tungsten film "and shoot shitty pictures of upstage." i wanna make compositionalimage, you know? i don't wanna do something that, like,

there's something about that four by five and it's like, there's athird here and a third here, and you know, how doyou hold the edge there? so. - i think what's interesting is you take very good traditional pictures. you can take a picturethat looks like a man ray or something that has that kind of force, but you're not treating itas kind of a precious thing.

like, you don't obey thosemodernist rules about, you know, and you couldbe very experimental with the process and veryirreverent about the print and about the way youcombine prints and such. so maybe take us, through, then. - yeah, let's go ahead. - some images here so we canshow what we're talking about. - two series, the previous double bill, and then leading to shelter island.

we'll show very well, the contrast between these kind of different.- [roe] yeah. - different ways of operating. - right, so i just addedthese first ten slides 'cause i realized, like, the, you know, shelter island book, it'sa, you know, slim volume. it's not a sort ofwandering epic like, deluxe, and i thought we'd bethrough with the talk, in like, no time, if ididn't bring some more stuff.

but also, it dawned to methat it was important to show the project thatpreceeded shelter island to sort of illustratethis tendency or instinct that i have to, it'salmost constantly happening where it's like, a, maybe idiosyncratic, but it's like, to counterpointthe project before or the thing before or play offwith tangential connections, and so we'll start offwith this picture here. this is a sort of a friend, a muse.

she was an abroad photo student. we started taking picturestogether about 10 years ago. no, that's not right. that's seven years ago,and so this initial image, the portrait of louiseparker was for a magazine, but i sort of cut her out very crudely, and dropped her portrait into a screenshot from the google streetview of a suburban home i grew up in atlanta, andthat google street view

is the last image in thesacrifice your body book, and so for me, that wasa way to sort of like tangentially connectthat sacrifice your body, with this group of pictures,which was called double bill with andy harmon andspecial guest louise parker. i just wanted to make a tvvariety show title, you know? so, yeah. if i'm jealous of anything,it's tv, you know? it's the best.

let's see, is this right? and so with the double bill series, it was the first time that i had sort of coming into this thing,limiting scope somehow, or keeping myself from the, giving myself some obstruction, rather than, it's the everythingpizza, where everything, you know, bring it in, bringin this wild juxtaposition things that just barelymake sense, and so for me,

this had a lot to do with my affection for my set and prop guy, andy harmon, but also some of the actualthings that we'd made, which, you know, when you'redoing commercial photography, a lot of times it feelslike there's an understood boundary, and the relationshipthat i have with this guy, andy, it's always, wejust go right to the edge, but in a weird way, likein the case of this, the edge is actually a veryseemingly conventional,

almost art historical image. but i also started bringingin these grid forms that things that were, would happensay on the day of the shoot, and they're instrumental during that time, but then nobody ever looked at 'em and needed them afterwards. it was sort of like a throwaway,like worse than an outtake. it wasn't anything, but ialso liked how i brought that sort of tiffanyblue into the background,

and there was something, asort of language about it that was sort of different and felt right. this is a picture at andy's studio. so i went over to hisstudio and just sort of spent an afternoon takingpictures of whatever was there as another sort of way to getto that multiple perspective. this is a picture inside my studio. i had just gotten this test print back. i started printing on dye-sublimation.

it's on a coated sheet of aluminum, and ebson transfer print comes reversed. it gets layed down onthe dye-sub aluminum, and has this kind ofweird hd quality to it. it's not like 3d, but it's kind of cheesy, and it's kinda consumer,and it's kind of wrong. definitely wrong. but when i got this eight by 10 sample, i just was like so excited,i took it around the studio

and made little still-lifesaround it, you know? so this is an example of oneof these kinds of, you know, finding the accident, you know? letting the wrong thing be the right thing or being inspired or allowing things in to the body of work thatare absolutely unintended. in this case, this particularpiece was the first one that we made andmy assistant joseph had been making model prints.

we had, like, a modelscale of the gallery. and so these little picturesinside the grid pictures were, you know, little prints that were gonna go, you know, to tryout this gallery model. but in his photoshopdocument, he had every layer open, so it turned intothis fucked up compressed thing on the screen that was just like, you really almost can't read it as one. well, you can't read it as one

and you can't read it as 15, you know? so it was kind of a, just a jam there, and later on, we added these backplates. that backplate image of thepickle and the salmon roe but that was taking, bringingall these random stuff that juxtaposition stuffinto a single frame, but in that also, like,doing it exactly wrong, the warhol thing with-- - can i ask if roe, personal

references in it in this case? - i think so. that's a picture thatandy and i made together, and i'd ask him to go to the grocery store in my neighborhood inrockaway, and you know, just get whatever hewanted, but he smuggled in some, what do you call it,expensive grocery store, you know, salmon eggs, so. - and i think he was like, hegot a big kick out of that.

"roe, ha ha, it's your name." and he poured it out on apickle and it was great. - it has, to me, the feelingof like surrealist collage or something like that, where it's a very contemporary form ofcollage and we feel like we've all gotten used to,we like collage, again. college wasn't really thatpopular in the art world maybe 10 years ago?- [roe] uh-huh. - it felt to me likeimages were very straight,

and now collages are all over the place. heineken has a, you know,retrospective at moma. suddenly, he's resurrected,and i was wondering, "why is collage making such a comeback?" but i think we're soused to seeing collages on our computer screens.- [roe] right. - all the time now. we've always got likefive our eight windows up at the same time, sowe think in collage now

in a way, maybe we didn't, you know. - well, i was, i thinkit was a couple days before i shipped out these pictures. i was standing in front of the print frames in the studio andlooking at my iphone. i was like, "oh, it's the iphone. "damn it, it's the damn iphone." and, so, i think for me,it's quite accidental. it wasn't a thing where i was like,

"i wanna take on collageor something like that." but there was something about the that sort of vernacular internet brochure kind of design like, i'm verybad at that kind of stuff. so i enjoy, you know,making bad design choices or something like that,but still with using these compositional images, andthen, there was something about hyperbolizing thatvernacular that was appealing. - yeah, it looks to melike familiar object

to a computer screen or an iphone screen, but you've sent it into a fugue state. - you've made it sort of crazy, but it has the kind ofsensuality to it, you know. i think your choices are notsimply to make the point, you know, intellectually. it's more about this looksreally interesting and amazing. it comes from a very visual place. - but it's also, for me, it'salso like a desperate place

because i didn't wanna uninclude,edit out these pictures. i wanted to have something,but instead of it expanding out into the space, it wascompressed into that screen, the sort of frame thatcontained, you know? cheers. - [kevin] our cappuccinos. i'm gonna have another one in a second. not sure what to tell ya. (audience laughs)

pickles and peas. there's a grocery storein rockaway beach called pickles and pies or, i can't. somehow, i always associate that with the grocery store there. and so this was originallyhow the louise image ran in the magazine. so that cutout, we justslid that cutout back if you remember that firstthing with the screenshot

from google maps or google street view. and so now we cut to shelter island. - [kevin] which, rightoff the bat, has a strong pictorial, you know, quality. the cover's very, almost kitsch, but at the same time beautiful. - [roe] kind of like an elevator button. - [kevin] that, too. taking you to that good place.

- [roe] yeah or down to the bad place. - [kevin] right. - so this is a little bitof a different variation of what is an actualbook, but this is a grid of screenshots made by my daughter while we were in shelter island. oh, i guess i shouldjust, should we bring in the context of what shelter island? so shelter island was shot over the month

of august on shelter island. it's a house that we had rented. this was the third year we had rented. it's one of those sortof american kit houses. it's like a sears housefrom the early 20th century. i guess mid, early 20thcentury that you sort of, you ordered it, they delivered it, and it got put together on site. and the family that owned it has kids

who are in their 20sand so their, the garage on their property isfull of, like, you know, this sort of like infancythrough adolescence of all the stuff that you, all the summer things that you want. so it was like, in a way,it was like a prop house for my, you know, enjoyment, and a set as well. but, you know, it'salso, there's something

about, in this, therewas a narrative idea. it's something aboutlike, containing that time making, putting that limitation on it, which was different from what i had been doing with sacrifice your body and le luxe where it was like anything can enter and this was a little bit more not anything, i mean, anythingcould enter, but you know. - as long as it was already in the garage.

- yeah, on the property. but, so this image thatwe're looking at right now is a grid of screenshotsthat my daughter made, and it's, you know, an amazing thing to me to watch her; she wasseven at the time, and her dexterity with the iphoneand making these screenshots. i actually had no ideahow she was doing these. she was swiping and shooting almost like a decisive moment for ascreenshot, you know?

- [kevin] between screens, right? - yeah, but also, forher, these are things that she liked and had meaning. she was doing screenshotsof a video of her like driving a boat, you know? so it has epic narrativequalities, but for my daughter, and i also liked the idea that, you know, in the same way that i'm working with andy harmon onlouise parker and there's

a collaborative or complicit relationship. there's something, there's just like a slightly exploited labor question, but that also was interesting to me with the family, sort ofexploiting that because to me, using your family as a subject manner was a big no no. i was like, "you don't go there." - it got sally manning into some trouble.

- i know. i don't want that kind of trouble. it was just like, therewas something about that forbidden pleasure ofusing the kids' production and incorporating that in. and so, yeah. - maybe this is a place to emphasize, in case it wasn't already apparent that you absorbed so much, sort of, familial.

you're making images thatlook, a lot of critics describe them as glossy and, you know, in a kind of negative way. they're beautiful, butthey have the kind of slick advertising look to them, but you're absorbing verypersonal and sentimental. your process is very involved with people who matter to you and so even though the product is something that looks like

advertising, the content of it is actually really traditionallypersonal in many ways, and you know, i wasthinking, musing earlier about the fact thatadvertising photography used to look so differentfrom the kinds of pictures that we all take on our iphones and post on instagram,and i think in some ways, we've all become kind ofprofessional photographers, and at the same time,professional photography

looks more ordinary or something. - like instagram. - so i think in some ways,if you just think about how people, you know,see these representations that we see all the time, if that. how do we find our ownidentity within that? how do we salvage that? you know, i think that'skind of the big question for a lot of people who see themselves

packaged, you know, as something that, like i would've never, you would've never seen your wife's picturelike in a movie marquee you know, 15 years ago. that sort of didn't happen'til pretty recently, and now we're all looking at, you know, our personal stuff in veryslick, professional formats all of a sudden.- [roe] yeah. - so i think, in a way, there's a kind of,

there's an importantcultural, i think maybe you're doing a lot of us have todo in one way or another where we salvage somethingfrom this kind of distribution, production,distribution of images that we're all participatingin all the time. i mean i find it totally confusing, but maybe other peoplecan explain it to me. so this is a portrait of my wife. initially, i thought thatthis shelter island book

was just going to be pictures of nancy, and then it sort of tooka turn more into this narrative thread of end of summer malaise, and, you know, lastsummer, as you all know, it was so fucking hot. it was like, you know, itdidn't rain for 30 days, and it was just like, ugh, so in some ways i feel like this sort ofcontains some of that, but it's also, like, the family picture.

i love those alex katzpaintings, you know. so it was kind of likethose things sort of mixing together and all that vacation heat and saltwater and... and while i wanted to makepictures of my family, i also wanted to findthat, whether you call it slick commercial, insome ways, i feel like every portrait in thebook, the figure has a mask or some mediating, some wayto distance you from them

and not tell you their personal story, and it becomes a play between, like, "is this a formal image or isthis telling us something?" you know, it's like, it's alsohappening in the sequence, which is, basically chronological. i love the, i started takingpictures of the weeds. it was summer. it was like, "man, got thatsort of photographer's block." and it's like, "well, what is,i need to be grounded here.

"what's gonna ground me? "what's close at hand?" and it was like, "ugh, thesedamn weeds are everywhere. "they're just so energetic." it kind of made sense in that way. and also, you know, for me, i've been growing the beard out, and i thought, "i don't know why i'm growing it. "it's just getting ridiculouswith the hair and the beard."

and then when this projectstarted, it was like, "okay, this is what it is." it's sort of like walt whitman every man thing, but in 2015, so. that became my disguise. in this particular picture,you can see my son auggie. he'd painted himself andsaid, "i'm a golden dragon." and so i had the camera already set up, and we just went out andmade a picture with it.

i feel like that, too, his makeup and that kind of thing, like, insome ways, it insulates him from this thing being really about him, and he becomes more about a boy, you know? father and son.- [kevin] he can be a superhero, you know, in his outfit. - [roe] right. - [kevin] and there's a reference that you probably didn't even think of.

it's longfellow and hiawatha,as well, is what i thought. it's a classic, you know. camp gichigumi, summer. - [roe] okay. - [kevin] summer thing, yeah. - [roe] i'll have to google it. someone google that right now?- [kevin] did you put the weed in the picture intentionally too? like how did that plant get there?

- [roe] yeah, i mean that'san old photographer's trick. i can't tell you. it's called puttingsomething in the foreground. but it's just lucky that it was there because we had the camera on a timer, so. yeah, that's one of those things where you get lucky like that,you praise the photo gods. little bit lucky too. so something like this.

this is like a, this really... there's a weird sort of difficulty in making a picture thatthat's basic and sort of, you know, people talkabout the deskilled image. in that case where we'reso skilled already, it's hard to tell whensomething is deskilled. in my sort of order ofhow images get made, this reminds me so much of these, like, i kind of, i grew up in miami from,

you know, from zero to10, and this kind of, whatever that is, the conchshell itself as a subject, but also that kind ofimage was so ubiquitous, and so it felt a little bitlike hearkening back to that. - certain subjects likeshells or flowers or sunsets. i mean, they're hard to take pictures of. james welling.- [roe] yeah, yeah. james welling took on the flower series just as a challenge.- [roe] right.

- like how can you actuallymake a rigorous picture of flowers because it's such a distracting, beautiful, kitsch subject. this is the one sort of disruption inside of the shelter island sequence. it's something i showedin june for gentle woman. it's pamela andersoneating grapes, obviously, and it was a picture that i really loved and wanted to use it, butcouldn't figure out why,

and then this fall, i was in london and i went to the wallacefoundation, which is amazing. you should go, it's free, and they have this 19th centuryfrench like, everything after the revolution or you know, like, and they have these figurinesthat represent the seasons. there's a figurine eatinga grape, and i was like, "oh, man, i inadvertentlyreferenced that picture, "but it works so perfectlywith pamela as the tool time

"kind of a girl, but also, like, beckoning "in the harvest seasonand the end of summer." it's a little hard to tell that it's her because you don't see that frontal view, but i just really lovethat, her sort of slightly disrupting instead of akind of, you know, form. - [kevin] it's a kindof a fantasy of a bounty in the middle of what i think is otherwise a kind of melancholy series.

i mean, as you proceedthrough the pictures, it's that fading of summer,the fleetingness of it. you know, coming up is apicture of dried flowers. - [roe] you know, just a little note. i love this. this is auggie, my son's hand. you know, it's a tinyhand with a tiny crab, but this crab is calledan asian shore crab, and apparently it's an invasive species

that hitches a ride in theballast of container ships as they sort of suck in waterin japan or china or russia to, you know, weight themselves down, and then they come to newyork or baltimore or boston and they release theirballast and so these crabs are in these little timewarps and then they, boop, come out on the east coast, and they're doing really well. they're eating up all themollusks, and you know,

i think they're calledopportunistic omnivores, which i like that. - [kevin] sort of like us. - [roe] yeah, i love it. some dead flowers. some empty coke bottles. so this is the kind ofstuff that's in this house, and i'd been looking atit for three summers. "i just love that stuff.

"why am i not taking a pictureof that thing, you know?" but i also love this, you know, for me, again, it was like with theweeds that i was saying. there's something that ifelt i really needed to, like, sort of apprehend images of things that were close at hand,and that didn't involve a kind of, "what cani do bigger and better "or more ambitious and makepeople just freak out?" it's like, "i need to beright here, you know?"

so the shell, theflowers, the coke bottles, the empty vessels, this kind of, like, thing just kept coming back. and so this is one of thescreenshots that was in the grid. and what i really lovedabout this image besides the fact that it was sortof a little bit wonky, a little bit devastating, beautiful. it's a picture of mydaughter taken by my son. so he's taking a picture ofher, and she takes the phone

and zooms in on her face andmakes a screenshot of that, and somehow, it's that thinglike i was talking about again, the four by five, holding the edge, that compositional, the diagonal. like there's formal qualities to it that's a bit wrong but-- - [kevin] she's following your footsteps. it's a very tight crop. - [roe] yeah, but italso, her face becomes

a little bit more of amask rather than like telling you who she is. it's more about a seven-year-old girl. - [kevin] well, i think there's a lot of surrealism in thepictures, and i don't know if you think about thisor not as you're doing it, historical surrealism where you have this ability to take something familiar and make it kind of uncanny and often

it's about the crop or a close-up. man ray did this too.- [roe] mm-hmm, mm-hmm. - [kevin] but even with that shell picture we just saw, that could be andrew weston, but he would've put it rightin the middle of the picture. you've got the edge cuttingof the edge of the shell and the weird shadow and things like that. things become somethingelse in the picture. - [roe] that's nice.

this actually was thelast day that we were on shelter island and ihad such an ominous sunset. it really was like, "okay,yeah, this was meant to be." i'm just gonna do this one real fast. - [kevin] and you shavedit off the next day, right? - [roe] no, no, it tooka little while longer, but a friend of mine was like, "oh, you'll live withthat for a long time." i'm not exactly sure what he meant,

but i kinda know what he meant, and the last two imagesin the book sequence. this was a recreation ofsomething that had happened the last two years in shelter where, i guess we're on thesouthwest side of the island, and so the south shore of long island is within view, and i assumethat people are flying kites on the beach on the atlantic ocean, and you know, that thingto have near a kid,

and you're letting it runout, run out, run out, and then (blows), kite goes. and so we had this thing where we had kites landing on our beach, and this particular case, i saw the string going out into the water andstart pulling it back in, and i was pulling it, asi was pulling it back in, i was like, "this is like the ray. "it's like chardan.

"it's like this thing islike this just barely alive "kind of anthropomoriphized thing, but also i love that checkerboard pattern, and it has a relationship to a picture i took in sacrifice yourbody with the palette and the football and the lavender. there was also something i really liked when i was thinking like, "i'llcall it kite in the water." and then i was like,"oh, knife in the water."

then i was like, "oh, ohme and auggie and nancy." you know, really perversetriangulation, you know? so. (clears throat) that's the end of the book. should we show this one too? - [kevin] what is the next one? is it just a more series or. - [roe] no, it's just the next two, things that were not in thebook but were in the show.

- i think it might be a good time to start asking for commentsor questions from the audience. - i'll let them imagine. comment, question?- [roe] any questions? - it's elaborating onthe use of your family and friends work in your own work, but you're also asking about how the advertising gets? you know, i have to say,i never actually used an

ad, so like, pretty mucheverything that i've used are things that i have not been paid for, have been out of pocket. there was times when,like, magazines actually used to pay you and thatdoesn't happen anymore. so forget about it,but, you know, in a way, there was some passiveaggressive sort of like, haha moment, but it was more about the image, you know?

and i think, like, there is something, for better or worse thatin a way i'm starting to regret it, but i felt like, "yes, i, within thiscapitalistic shit show, "i am a, you know, i'm labor, you know? "and i depict labor." "you know that model? "we, she and i, we worked today." you know what i mean?

there was some way of representing that, and you know, i didn't, i was in a big marxist, it was like partof the thing, you know? it was part of that, like,there was something about work. - there's a little bit of thefeeling that you're stealing office supplies from work, too, though. do you actually make a separation between, do you have contractswith people and you know what you can reuse in a gallery show?

like that j, was it the j.crewcover that you put in a show? - yeah, yeah, that's true. - and it's okay to do that? - i don't think it is, no. but nobody got upset, so. - but it's differentincorporating your family's, you know, production in this too, and i think you rightly havesome reservations about it. - well, you know, i thinkthat, the first thing

that i did when i was a beautypicture for allure magazine and it was the first time wherei was like, "is this okay?" you know, so there wassomething, that kind of anxiety. and i remember the model,it was a ps1 graded new york the first time,and she threatened to sue me and so i gave her money and i was like, i only recently foundout, i guess i shouldn't. i'm not a legal expert,but that it was okay to do that kind of thingif it was only used

as an artwork and not as a thing to sell a product or, you know. photographers have certainrights in new york city. - it's a bigger issue withphotography in general, too. anyone who does street photography, they take pictures ofpicture they don't know. those people don't sign anything to say, and then that person can,the artist can sell that work in a gallery and profit from it.

i mean it's-- - right, and i used to say like this is, the studio work islike my street photography where anything could happen here. there is the job thatwe're trying to like, "how do you put on lipstick "or how do you put on eyeliner?" or something, but thenthere's this off moment that happens that has nothing to do

with the story and, you know, because it is editorial, i can sort of, in that case it's not unnaming, it's naming it as an artworkand putting it into this sort of field of roe ethridge photography. - you don't think consciouslyof what you're doing with the outtakes as likea critique of advertising or something like that. i think.- [roe] not really.

- something you and i talk about sometimes is the way we both wantto evade the existing categories or just not usethe word archive, for example. we call your work inventory.- [roe] yeah. - just ways too--- [roe] but it makes more sense as inventory'cause it's not really-- - 'cause it's more accurate, yeah. but, you know, if we were jumping onto this sort of art jargon bandwagon,

we would be sitting heretalking about archive and, you know, index and things like that. - maybe, yeah. i mean, i feel like i picked up the term inventory from ann goldstein,so that's pretty official art world stuff, you know? but it made so much sense to me because of the way the relationship with commerce that photography has andi have as a photographer,

and the way these imageswere being deployed like it's like a selected, you know. you see one t-shirt, youknow, but there's 10 others hanging up over here. but you know, it's likehow these things got-- - inventory's dynamic in a way, you know. an archive isn't. an archive is-- - well, inventory is the gap.

- boxed up.- [roe] right? - right, yeah. - or jcpenney or whatever. an archive is like, you know, art school, and you know, german things, and (laughs) the dekkers. - yeah, it's boxed upand, you know, put away. but inventory is, "we need more inventory. "let's move this inventory."- [roe] right.

- "let's bring this."- [roe] right. - is there music that goes with the work? - yeah, i mean, it soundslike such an old timer thing, but i'm gonna say, but it was, we went to see neil young at the, what's that place in jonesbeach auditorium, and... oh, god. i'm not gonna sing it. - you used to be in a band, right?

- i know, right? can i bring my guitar out? yeah, i didn't... you know, it's funny. i don't have soundtracks. i feel like you can, it'salmost like that thing where if you turn the sound downon a tv and you put music on, it goes together, you know what i mean? and somehow, it's timedup with the commercials.

it's like, "holy shit. "slayer goes with, youknow, days of our lives? "who knew?" you know, like, but they're, so for me, that synesthesia of thesound and image thing is more internal, maybe. like, you know when it's making a sound when it's singing or humming. - do you play music in the studio

when you're doing a professional shoot? - yeah, that is a complaint. i don't hear it. you know, usually, someone'slike, "can we turn this off?" i'm like, "oh, there's music on." and so, you know, i love musicand i love having it around, but it seems like thesedays, like, you turn it on, and someone calls. you turn it down, youstart talking on the phone

and you forget to turnit back on, you know? - so it's more of a relaxingthing than a working thing. bad jokes are very good andawkward silences are good. you just gotta make sure you're, you know, taking a picture at that point. i think it's, for me,that was something also that it was learned where i was like, being a director wasn'treally what i wanted, what i wanted to be was surprised or moved

or, you know, emotionallyinvolved, and because it was photography, i didn'tneed it to be the whole movie. you know, i didn't needthis one image to, like, "this is the character whogoes through this and that." like, i just need thisone image, you know? and that's hard to get, but,you know, how do i get that? so it didn't seem subversive,but there was something about a model smiling in a picturethat's an art picture that just seemed, youknow, i guess heineken

had that because he wasusing, he was appropriating imagery of that sort ofamerican healthy smiling figure. but for me, it was likethis sick pleasure of like making a girl laugh islike the best feeling ever. something like that, andit wasn't every time, but it was like, youknow, there was something about that that was, itwas like a representation of that moment where it waslike everything was dropped or in other cases whereeverything was awkward,

and i assisted a photographerwho insisted that, he liked to infuriatesubjects because it made a better picture, you know, and so, like, a lot of his subjects were like intensely looking at the camera like, "go to hell. "i didn't really wanna do this photoshoot "and you're really bugging me, you know?" and so he has this quality or something, and for me, it was sort of more close,

and you know, sort of. - you were looking forsomething more ambiguous. maybe it was just, a-- - i don't know if i do. i don't think that i do,but there is that thing, and maybe it's something that'slike learned over doing it, but like, it happened, itstarted happening to me. i tried to work with quark,okay, back a long time ago, and then someone's like,"indesign is easy."

so i started working with indesign, and i was working withit, i was realizing like this is like writing music, you know? as i'm like putting onething next, taking it out. now it's like, mmm,you know, making sound. i used to play in a band and i know a little bit about music. not much, but it startedto have that feeling of like, it wasn't an album.

it was a song, you know? it was like, and so this is a longzong, and you know, whatever, and i noticed that it was happening inthe gallery exhibitions too where if you could likeget the right combination, it sort of, it's notlike you go into a state or have extrasensory things,but you could just feel it. i don't know, that seemedrisky in a way at the time because those thingsneeded to be so buttoned up

and theoretically sound and not intuitive, and so that was also,like, liberating for me because i was so, i don'tknow, repressed or something or wanted to be repressedand wanted to express repression or something like, so yeah, that was like, i wouldn't stake, i wouldn't claim any,yeah, extrasensory thing. - putting together anysequence or group of images, i mean, if it sings, to use a metaphor,

it needs to, it's an intuitive process. you just kind of know it. i mean i know it when i'mhanging pictures on the wall for a show, two things startto bounce off each other. it's a formal relationshipor it's an idea or something between them or multiple,ideally, but yeah. - yeah, i think, youknow, there's a sort of, there are certain artiststhat you connect to early and then you sort ofreconnect to them later,

and for me, alex katz wasso seductive right away. it was like that flatness,that semi-photo realism, and he was so cool, you know? and i think there's beena lot of alex katz, like, in my face recently becauseof the gavon brown thing, and you know, it's like,he's also like, i don't know. he's getting up there, masterclass alex katz, you know? so that kind of thing, butalso the subject matter where you, you know, andi feel like that's part

of the matiss thing toowhere you take this intimacy this close at hand subject manner and then you flatten itout or you stylize it. so you bring the thingthat's closest to you, and you put some sort ofmediating style or flatness to it. it creates a kind of tensionthat i think i want to have in my work and you know,with working with the family as a subject, that was part of that. yeah, i mean, it's, like i said,

it started off feeling like the right way to do it is to like sit down and, you know,really think about it, and write down a tight thesis and make sure you reference rollin' barts, and you know walter benjamin. don't screw that up, you know? and so i was trying to be agood methodist student, boy, you know, i'll do all the right things

and you know, like, the work will be good, and i started to feellike, this is really, this isn't true somehow, and i found that, like, it's really hard to do it any which way you do it. there isn't like an easy way, but for me, what made sense washaving the work guide it, rather than me decide whatit's going to be about and then execute that.

i don't think it's invalid to do that. i think a lot of greatwork that i'm inspired by does exactly that: illustratesa thesis or, you know, it was like about a thing. like christopher williams, i fucking love christopherwilliams, you know. it's endless. like the footnotes andcitations are, you know, great. but, like, for me, icouldn't live in that,

or make work in thatparadigm or that platform. does that answer your question? - so let's end it there, and everyone meet in the lobby for book signing. - and champagne.- [kevin] and champagne. (audience applauds and cheers)