In the spirit of his oeuvre, Roe Ethridge's Farewell Horse is at first encounter both seductive and elusive. The book itself, bound in natural cloth with a tipped-in photograph on the cover, is structured in three distinct and seemingly unrelated parts – the central one being black and white photographs of wild horses. These horses, I researched and discovered, were at one time domesticated but later abandoned on Cumberland Island off of Georgia's coast. Outtakes from a magazine shoot (from which many of Ethridge's fine art images derive), the feral animals are pictured intimately against palm trees, vinyl siding and on the beach. The photographs immediately imply a situation fraught with solitude yet occasionally reveal moments of glory.

In conversation with the work of Thomas Ruff, Michael Schmidt, Christopher Williams and other artists who are interested in the language and conventions of the medium, Ethridge embraces the arbitrariness of the image. “For me, serendipity and intention are both necessary,” he has said of his work, which comes through in his practice. By arranging and rearranging his photographs in various edits and contexts, Ethridge continually reveals their elasticity and reminds us of the possibility for new meanings later down the road.




Between 1995 and 1997, Ethridge made the thirteen blurry black and white photographs of flower arrangements that follow the horses. At that time, he just graduated from college and owned a 4x5 camera body but no lens. With little money, he rigged a pinhole lens and photographed the still lifes using “modified textiles” (cheap patterned fabric that he painted on) as backdrops. Ethridge traces his inspiration for these works to both the Bechers and Matisse, which is surprisingly apparent. The studies are at once dreary and sublime.



The color photographs that begin the book elicit an eerie sense of mystery. Their subject matter is rather ordinary, even familiar, perhaps scenes from Ethridge’s own daily life: a red checkered umbrella, an empty chair, the shadow of a fence, a snowy picture overlooking part of the Williamsburg bridge. Farewell Horse offers no accompanying text, just these sets of photographs for the viewer to reflect upon. It isn’t long before we realize that part of the point is this search for significance. Opportunely, Ethridge’s photographs have a distinctive ability to reveal the layers of meaning that lie beyond the surface if only we’re willing to really look. —Shane Lavalette