Roe Ethridge grew up in Dunwoody, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta. One can only surmise the level of banality there and the effect it had on this artist. This suburb has a highway intersection tagged “Spaghetti Junction,” and on every corner there is a strip mall, each more unlovely than the next. The beauty Ethridge found in this place is reflected in his photos, which successfully mix nostalgia with irony.

In an early exhibition of 1995, Ethridge showed a series of photos that were made with a pin hole camera of a blurred figure in front of walls with decorative wallpapers of yellow, blue, and pink flowers. These photos called up the images of portrait paintings from the 19th century mixed with pattern and decoration paintings as background for Francis Bacon-ish blurs of the sitter.

Most striking are Ethridge’s self-portraits. In 2010, an art collector commissioned him to photograph his collection, which included an etching of a Rembrandt self-portrait based on a painting by Raphael, Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione, 1514–1515. Rembrandt sketched the Raphael while it was up for auction, redrawing the painting and using the composition as the basis for a self-portrait on an etching plate. Ethridge photographed this Rembrandt etching, and the photograph is now in the collection of Museum of Modern Art in New York. Ethridge went on to make several significant self-portraits; the lineage of both portraiture and self-portraiture is important to understanding Ethridge’s work. He is acutely aware of the references he makes and where his work fits into the art historical canon. His own self-portraits do not reinvent compositions of the past, but more importantly, connect his work to the image of the artist and its relationship to self, to portraiture, and to persona.