“Roe Ethridge’s images capture the unique and sometimes sublime weirdness of Rockaway, a place I love for its racial and economic diversity, all the while living here in trepidation about its infrastructural vulnerabilities. Rockaway is a hub of contradictions. It’s New York’s face to the majesty of the open Atlantic Ocean. It’s the wildness of Jamaica Bay and Fort Tilden. And, encompassing the “uptown” Rockaway neighborhoods of Belle Harbor and Breezy Point, it’s one of the city’s most politically conservative sectors. (They adore the Queens boy Donald Trump uptown.) Rockaway Beach is “downtown,” a landscape blotted by tightly packed, gambrel-roofed houses clad in vinyl siding, desultory strip malls, blocks of nondescript brick housing towers, and a tremendous amount of telephone poles that in other parts of the city were disappeared but here stand as sentinels of urban grit. Ethridge’s images show all that—bits of beauty spattered with dollops of blight.”—Eva Diaz, from Aperture Issue #242: “New York”
