American artist Roe Ethridge's latest book takes its title from the French "C'est pas du luxe", an ironic phrase which alludes to the superfluous nature of luxury whilst proclaiming how essential it is to existence. Such paradoxes are fluently woven through Ethridge's oeuvre and Le Luxe encompasses his practice from the past decade, without ever slipping into the moribund gravitas of a retrospective.

Plumbing his diverse image inventories, from personal images and magazine commissions to an archive of online screen shots, the book continues his exploration of picture-making that disavows the potential for creating a finished work. Ethridge para-phrases Eggleston when he states that he is "at war with the finished" in an era of digital photography straining towards idealisation. The pristine conditions of photography are undermined in the book's design and riff on Henri Matisse's apposite aphorism "exactitude is not truth" (Matisse titled two of his paintings Le Luxe).

Composed in three parts, Le Luxe contains an unusual backdrop, the everyday of the artist, who worked from November 2005 to January 2010 on one commission documenting a building in downtown Manhattan on a site adjacent to the World Trade Centre. This narrative offers an uneasy balance to the fissures between analogue and digital and Ethridge's consistent undermining of his own certainties. (Publisher)

美國藝術家Roe Ethridge最新一本攝影集書名Le Luxe取自於法文「C'est pas du luxe（這不算奢華）」，這句話語帶暗示：一方面聲稱奢華有存在的必要性，卻又同時諷刺它的浮濫過剩。

這本書富含結構性，包涵了他的私人照片、為雜誌拍攝的商業作品、以及一系列網路截圖等，透過影像次序的重組與調度，他持續地探索「影像製造」這件事的開放性意義。在這個追求完美成像的數位攝影時代，Ethridge重新詮釋老牌攝影家William Eggleston的創作路徑，並說他自己是「帶著完成品上戰場」。

在內頁的排版設計上，他讓截圖模糊地呈現，不若它們原先於網頁上呈現的模樣，映射了藝術家亨利˙馬蒂斯曾說過的一句話：「精確並不代表真理」。（馬蒂斯有兩幅繪畫作品皆取名為Le Luxe）

此書背後擁有一個特殊的故事，其中包含一份長達五年的委託創作，在2005年到2010年間，他記錄了曼哈頓市中心、與世界貿易中心比鄰的一座建築工程運作。在這樣的背景襯托之下，可看出Ethridge試圖平衡數位與底片之間的裂隙，也持續地挑戰自身對於攝影的確信。