Roe Ethridge on the Artwork of Collaboration

This story is taken from the Spring/Summer 2026 subject of AnOther Magazine: 

“The most spark-producing thing for me right now is this magnetism between my girlfriend Lulu and me, and our conversation around the images we’re making. I’ve always had a mix of people in my life with different voices that I trust to edit my work. My new project, Rude in the Good Way, has a few pictures I’ve been taking with Lulu. It’s extremely collaborative – she takes pictures of me too. There is no way these pictures exist without the two of us together – on the bed or in her friend’s backyard with this kid’s soccer net. It’s almost like I’m having to articulate myself to a world, and that world is another person. We’re so invested in what we’re doing that, in a way, it doesn’t really matter if anybody else is. I wouldn’t say it’s all romance and flowers. Lulu and I are turning into a little bit of a monster together. It’s like you just started a band with somebody and you’re trying to relearn how to play a three-chord rock song. There’s discovery and frustration, but when it sounds good, it sounds better than anything else.”

For virtually three many years, Roe Ethridge has moved fluidly between style and high-quality artwork pictures, capturing high-octane campaigns for manufacturers together with Balenciaga and staging conceptual exhibitions all over the world. Across playful portraits, style editorials and intimate snapshots from his on a regular basis life, the hyperreal gloss of the American photographer’s digital photos is commonly marred by imperfection: an early self-portrait with a black eye, a nonetheless lifetime of fruit reworking into ashen mounds of furry mould. His newest present and e-book, Rude within the Good Way, pushes his provocative visible experiments additional, with Lindsay Lohan in a set-designed spoof of Miami, images of John Currin’s pornographic work from the early 2000s, and erotic portraits of Ethridge’s companion and collaborator, Lulu Sylbert. 

This story options within the Spring/Summer 2026 subject, marking 25 years of AnOther Magazine, on sale now.