What constitutes being “Rude in the Good Way”? It’s impossible not to ponder what exactly this title – bringing together the recent and not-so-recent work of New York-based photographer Roe Ethridge  – indicates. Conceptually, it hints at some degree of audacity and insolence; visually, Rude in the Good Way is flecked with lace lingerie, argyle socks, bouclé blazers, flowers, shells, pearls, underboob, and Lindsay Lohan.

Ethridge works interchangeably between commercial and art spheres, nonchalantly flitting from the branded to the anonymous: shooting for Calvin Klein and exhibiting at Gagosian (where he currently has a show on view at its Athens space until 7 March). A curator once called Ethridge’s images “laconic drop-kicks to the eye”, while a critic said that he “pushes glossy lifestyle imagery into awkwardness”. Below, we spoke to the photographer about embracing visual tangents, photographing nudity, and latent sociopolitical anxiety.

The title of the book is very evocative, and I was wondering how it sets the tone for your work.

Roe Ethridge: Well, sometimes you get lucky, and a phrase just comes into your head. It came in a flash and stuck. It did feel like putting my money where my mouth is. A lot of people are asking, ‘What is rude, what is polite?’ It’s sort of that dialectical idea of the good way and the rude way, morphing into this other thing. It’s philosophy 101 stuff, but it makes sense to me as a way to think about the work. 

When photographing someone like Lindsay Lohan, viewers come with pre-existing perceptions. Can you talk about depicting celebrities in general – how that preconception element can complicate what you want to transmit?

Roe Ethridge: With Lindsay, it’s not that it could be anybody, right? [With celebrity], it’s different every time. That said, there are some generalities around it. Celebrity brings with it almost a dark intensity. She is a ubiquitous thing, but it's not a ubiquitous thing like UPS or a checkered tablecloth. It's a person who is continuing to re-contextualise themselves in public all the time, and we are all experiencing it. Unless you decide not to participate in culture, which is fine too. 

In this case, I photographed her in the studio in front of a green screen. I used my cousin who lives in Miami to take background pictures. I also used pictures from my book Sacrifice Your Body and pictures from my parents’ hometown in Belle Glade, Florida. When I was taking pictures of the sugar cane, I accidentally put my car in the canal. And then I put the car that Lindsey was using in the story, in place of mine, in Photoshop.

That’s interesting, this revisiting your own work. One image in Spare Bedroom has the same wallpaper as in Rude in a Good Way. Even the act of republishing works from earlier in your career is a kind of revisiting. Why does relying again on things that you’ve already used feel important to you?

Roe Ethridge: I was fascinated and repulsed by my generic middle-class suburban lot in life, and hated it in many ways. Later on, I came to appreciate it and realised, ‘Oh man, I had a pretty good life’ – in terms of privilege, but also there was something in this generic identity, or non-identity, of middle-class, American Southern, suburban blah blah blah that I could use as subject matter. My dad was interested in photography, but in a sort of ‘southern suburban man’ way, of just being interested in ‘what’s a good photograph’: that’s a good photograph of a flower, that’s a good photograph of a bumblebee, that’s a good photograph of a car. It sort of predetermined, in some ways, that I would be interested in these generic typologies, these stock photography things.

I assisted catalogue photographers in Atlanta after I graduated from high school, and I was rolling film and lighting JC Penney’s catalogues. Instead of being an appropriator of culture, like Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman or Lichtenstein – who I love – I love making pictures, so I wanted to make the pictures: I wanted to author something, without it being like, ‘I’m the genius behind this picture.’ I liked the idea of mediating that notion of genius through stock photography and the diminished forms of the image… It was a way to self-appropriate. The idea of repurposing from my inventory is as if I have a stock library that I can pull from.

You just mentioned this exasperation with your background. I read an interview where you said, ‘I’m interested in weird America’, and talked about David Lynch as a reference. I could see that in Rude in a Good Way: there was something recognisable, but very uneasy at the same time. Even with typologies, you’re altering them in a way that creates something askew. How do you cultivate that?

Roe Ethridge: I used to say, ‘If I don’t have a feeling of nausea, maybe it’s not a good photo.’ I don’t think I feel that way so much anymore, but there’s still something to that. There is a sweet spot where – and I’m not always trying to get the same thing – I want to stay open-ended and accommodating to discovery, as the priority: the things that I didn’t know I could do with a camera. Or I come in with an idea, but the tangent is so much better; my brain cannot think as well as the things that are on the periphery. So I’m always looking for that. 

There is something especially right now – I mean, Jesus Christ, I think I haven’t slept well in months, you know? This fucking time that we're living through is… awful. In some ways, I want to reserve the right to make beautiful things, despite it being a horrible time, and to not have to be a political commentator or purveyor of an ideology or stuck in a theoretical loop where I’m just navel-gazing. I want richness in my life, a wealth of experiences and ideas, so that’s the priority. But I’m certain that something’s happening here that’s reflecting a kind of mistrust or discomfort or unease… You don’t have to try. It’s just in there, you know?

Yes, I get that – a baseline malaise. Are the images from Rude in a Good Way all from a recent timeline?

Roe Ethridge: This is a great example of that ‘inventory’ notion. There are different time periods. The newest pictures are of [my girlfriend] Lulu. We have hundreds of pictures that we made over the last year. I just put a couple in to introduce this stuff. But that keyed the pictures I took at John Currin’s studio, which I had been like, ‘When am I ever gonna get to use this?’ Somehow, it felt like the pictures with Lulu and the pictures of John Currin’s studio connected. It’s almost like that serendipity or discovery that what I’m looking for when I’m making pictures happened in the edit.

Is the connection because they’re both so embodied? How do you approach nudity and intimacy?

Roe Ethridge: I think that there’s been a sort of desire-signifying thing happening in my work from the very beginning. The first picture that I showed at a New York gallery was an outtake from a beauty shot of a model smiling, and, to me, it felt like it was sublimated. I felt like you could sense that there was this circuit of me wanting her to look great, her wanting to look great. It was more than just the male gaze looking upon a beautiful woman. We’re not friends! It was a rent-a-muse, rent-a-photographer relationship. It was totally transactional, but there’s a desire on my side, a desire on her side, and it’s all in that one picture of her face. 

With Lulu, we had had a crush on each other 25 years ago. And when we reconnected, it was like: she’s just one of those people. She’s this 50-year-old sexy lady, and she wanted to do these pictures, and I wanted to do these pictures. Instead of going around the edges, it is just really explicit. I think there’s a lot more conversation around older ladies, not just kids and weird fucking perverted shit. This sexuality is a subject of conversation culturally, too. It feels like it could be controversial, and certainly there are conversations that Lulu and I have about who the author of the image is and whether it is an equal collaboration. In some ways, there's an irresolvable issue around that kind of authorship. But I will say, she’s taking some pictures of me and those may come out someday. We’ll have the opposite conversation [laughs].

Roe Ethridge’s Rude In A Good Way is published by Loose Joints and is available here now.