I just took a walk over to Spoonbill & Sugartown, my local art-bookstore, to pick up a signed copy of Roe Ethridge’s rare catalog titled Apple and Cigarettes.

Apple and Cigarettes was published last year by Gagosian Gallery, with a limited number of copies made. If you’ve been seaching for this book it’s worth stopping into Spoonbill as, according to the store clerk, Ethridge occasionally drops by with one or two more after the others have sold.

The book, made to accompany an exhibition that opened in May of 2006, is 52 pages long with 21 color photographs and includes a short essay by David Rimanelli.

Gagosian writes about the exhibition:

In Apple and Cigarettes, more than ever, Ethridge’s images emanate from his direct experience of the world. His focus is multiple and restless as he works to capture the vivid and intimate details of his various locales. In doing so, he moves freely among the classic genres of the photographic medium - portrait, landscape, and still life.

This striking series of photographs - which includes the title image of a blighted apple and a full ashtray, a stagy studio portrait of a retired policeman, a rattlesnake poised to strike, a cutting board with fish guts, a babble of hand-painted text advertisements, and a young, auburn-haired woman smoking a pipe - contains visual and thematic relationships that gesture towards the narrative components found in literature and film.

Fans of Ethridge may be happy to hear that Steidl will be publishing Rockaway, NY, a new book of his said to come out in October, 2007.

The mood of Roe Ethridge’s Rockaway, NY suggests a nostalgic depiction of scenes from a coastal village. The snow covered boardwalk, the cemetery, the shops in town, and a quiet street in late summer all appear at first glance to be genre scenes, revealing Ethridge’s casual application of diverse pictorial modes and themes. The locales blend, imitate and disguise one another. Photographed in disparate geographical sites, from St. Barts to upstate New York, Ethridge plays the roles of both a thematic archivist and a wandering narrator, mapping an uncertain ground in which it is unclear if the representation is a blank image, nothing more than the sum of it’s surface, or the fountainhead of some deeper significance.

Pre-order Rockaway, NY here.

And visit my last post on Roe Ethridge for more on him and his work.

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