Roe Ethridge Shoots His Girlfriend, Calls It Collaboration

Roe Ethridge has been photographing commercially and editorially for two decades. Fashion, still life, fine art shows in Chelsea. The work sits somewhere between Gursky's deadpan and Tillmans' intimacy, but never quite lands in either camp.

Now he's talking about his girlfriend. Her name is Lulu. They're making images together. The conversation around those images is what he calls the most spark-producing thing in his practice right now. That's the line inAnOther's Spring/Summer 2026 issue, tucked into a profile that otherwise skims his commercial clients and gallery roster.

The detail worth holding: Ethridge has always worked with a mix of people. Assistants, stylists, subjects who show up because someone called someone. But this is different. He's calling it magnetism. He's calling it conversation. The images aren't credited as co-directed, but the framing suggests they might as well be.

It's a studio relationship becoming the studio subject. Not new in art photography (see: Goldin, Moriyama, half of Nan's peers). But rare to see stated this plainly in a fashion-adjacent profile. Most photographers at Ethridge's level talk about light, about the client, about Photoshop versus film. They don't talk about their girlfriend as the creative engine.

The work itself isn't pictured in the piece. No stills, no spreads. Just the claim that the magnetism is there and it's producing something. Whether that lands in a gallery or stays in the contact sheets is an open question.

Ethridge's last solo show was 2023 at Gladstone. The next one will either include Lulu's name in the wall text or it won't. That's the tell.