Davies, Lucy, Roe Ethridge: Commercial Break, The ... - Greengrassi

Prize fighters, Time Out London, April 13, 2011
Prize fighters
The final four in the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2011, rated
and reviewed
As the Photographers’ Gallery gets a facelift, we go underground to see the Deutsche
Börse Photography Prize in a new venue and to rate the finalists’ chances in this £30k
shutter showdown
Roe Ethridge
For a fluorescent lesson in the dissonances of capitalism, see Ethridge. The American artist
wilfully ignores the barrier between commercial photography and art, with the pleasing result
that you’re never quite sure if he’s trying to sell you something. That bland beauty at
Thanksgiving dinner, sandwiched between a weirdly shiny turkey and a Japanese wall
hanging: what is she offering, exactly? And why does she look so wrong? Actually, she’s a
model, and the food has been styled. But that helps only in the way that buying a lipstick
helps a woman feel beautiful: it’s a temporary solution, inadequate to the scale of the
problem. There’s another image of her, not included here, in a daring emerald dress. The
whole exercise was originally a shoot for fancy magazine Visionaire. That doesn’t help, either.
The hanging speaks of one venerable culture, the dinner of another. The retouched babe in
between doesn’t speak – fantasies don’t – but her silence is infinitely troubling.
Ethridge comprehends greed, of all kinds. His still life of rotting fruit is so luscious it switches
off atavistic alarms: you want to stroke the mouldy strawberries, lick the superannuated
nectarine. His flawless images laugh at our obsession with perfection, and this flawed
exhibition, in its unforgivingly cavernous temporary home, echoes with that amusement.
Verdict Ethridge for President.