Like a 1960s Pop artist, Roe Ethridge makes cool, formally sophisticated pictures referencing the kinds of banal low-culture imagery that surrounds us. He does not pilfer and copy existing imagery in the manner of his contemporary Richard Prince but instead makes pictures of the real world that have the pumped-up aesthetic glow of advertisements. As a result, landscapes such as New York OS Old Pond have a florid chromaticism familiar from fall foliage calendar art and real-estate circulars while also slyly referencing the gauzy, soft-focus views of nature from the turn of the century by Pictorialist photographers such as Edward Steichen.​

Roe Ethridge has developed his work as an artist from his previous experience as a commercial photographer in the field of advertising, and uses these settings playfully as frames of reference that no longer focus on the the fictional world of advertising, but look at it from the inside out. The setting (or parts of the setting) become the main protagonists, and the characters perform as real-life personas. ​

He also creates photographs that simply depict advertising and commercial displays with an unsparing directness that lends them the character of objects or captures them as relevant traces of civilisation in the tradition of Walker Evans or late Pop Art. By presenting photography as a technical and artistic medium so commonplace that even deliberately inaccurate colours can be deployed as a playful critique of our contemporary western culture, Roe Etheridge addresses the oppressively narrow confines between high and low, reality and fiction as a topical issue of our times.