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Roe Ethridge (Born 1969 in Miami) often focuses his camera on mundane subjects, ranging from a kitchen counter in a suburban home to shopping mall signs and barren winter landscapes. With the eerie drama of a David Lynch film, Ethridge’s photographs uncover the unusual in the ordinary.

In Holly at Marlow and Sons, the subject is a young woman who stands behind the counter at a nondescript café, perhaps Marlow and Sons in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The photographer inserts the viewer into a position that is familiar, considering options at a local shop while the staff waits to take the order. The appealing composition of this portrait is reinforced by the repetition of forms—the folded dollar bills in the tip jar, the black-and-white stripes on Holly’s turtleneck, the items filling the shelves behind the counter. Ethridge’s masterful use of shallow depth of field and soft focus calls to mind his commercial and product photography experience.

As the third work by Ethridge acquired by the ICA/Boston, Holly at Marlow and Sons helps suggest the breadth of his practice. This work joins a strong collection of photographic portraits by such artists as Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Rineke Dijkstra, and Nan Goldin, and, in representing an art image drawn from everyday experience, has a connection with the video works of Christian Jankowski and Rachel Perry.

Roe Ethridge’s (Born 1969 in Miami) work interrogates the relationship between commercial and fine art photography to reveal a shared language. He is celebrated for subtly manipulating banal subjects—from rotting oranges to suburban families—to heighten their intrinsic drama.

Untitled is part of a series of images of pigeons that Ethridge began in 2000. Using a high-speed flash, he captures the bird mid-flight. Connected to the history of photography, specifically the photographic experiments investigating animals’ motion conducted by Étienne Marey and Eadweard Muybridge, Ethridge’s series appears to monumentalize and eternalize an ordinary urban animal. The pigeon depicted, however, is no ordinary bird, but a trained “extra” rented from Universal Studios, set against a studio backdrop that mimics the blue of the sky.

Untitled joins other works in the ICA/Boston collection by this prominent contemporary photographer, whose work was featured in a solo exhibition at the museum in 2005, offering an opportunity to showcase its breadth and diversity.

Roe Ethridge (Born 1969 in Miami) is both a commercial photographer and a conceptually driven fine art photographer, and he uses each side of his practice to nourish the other. His photographic work displays the extremely high polish and sharp clarity of the print technology available for promotional photography today, yet his handsomely rendered views of people, places, and animals come across as things that are as alien as they are familiar.

County Line Meadowmere Park, one of sixteen photographs included in Ethridge’s solo exhibition at the ICA/Boston in 2005, is from the series County Line, which records views of a quiet ocean-side community located on the Nassau County line in Queens, New York. As this photograph demonstrates, though the artist uses a particular location as a touchstone for this series, he balances specificity with generalization. This handsome view of boats, water, and foliage topped by a generous swath of blue sky and puffy clouds is reminiscent of a classic Dutch landscape, but it is edged with signs of contemporary life, such as the boats’ instrumentation and engines. Duality is further marked by the sky’s subtle shift in tone near the center of the image—Ethridge’s wry reference to the county line marked by the waterway shown. In these seductive images, dividing lines that are present but not fully visible keep the viewer at a certain distance.

Marlene Dumas (Born 1953 in Cape Town, South Africa) makes expressive figurative oil paintings and watercolor drawings that explore the multiple dimensions of love, beauty, the body, and sexuality. She finds inspiration for her paintings, which often feature women, from source material that includes fashion photography, newspaper clippings, film, fine art, and pornography. Dumas also uses loaded imagery to provoke strong emotional responses from viewers.

German Witch is a characteristic example of Dumas’s large-scale watercolors, rendered with a finely modulated monochromatic wash and additional tonal accents. The effect is both fluid and sensuous, recalling something of the fleshy nudes of her Flemish forebear Peter Paul Rubens. As befits a witch, the image has its mysterious side. The figure turns to look over her shoulder, yet we do not know what she sees. At the same time, our attention is drawn to the stick protruding from her behind: how, we might wonder, will such a tiny broomstick keep such an ample witch aloft?

Tara Donovan (Born 1969 in New York) often constructs her installations and sculptures by transforming large quantities of mass-produced items—such as drinking straws, straight pins, wooden toothpicks, and plastic buttons—into stunning works of phenomenal impact. She frequently uses the inherent characteristics of the materials to develop her deeply intricate works.

Nebulous appears almost like a mist concentrated over the floor; its uneven shape suggests either a blown-up view of microscopic mold or a scaled-down model of the Milky Way. The work’s title hints at the uncertain perceptual experience that is created with nothing but “invisible” and “magic” Scotch tape. Donovan loops thousands of frosted strips into an irregular airy weave, saying, “Like fog, it becomes so soft. It looks like it grew out of the floor.” The groundbreaking installation signals Donovan’s exploration of the fugitive effects of light-reactive materials on architectural spaces. It has been singled out by the artist as her favorite piece for its successful visual transformation of the ordinary into the sublime.

Since 2001, when the ICA/Boston organized one of her first solo museum shows in the United States, Rineke Dijkstra (Born 1959 in Sittard, Netherlands) has become known for her incisively direct photographic and video portraits of individuals in the midst of change. Through series like The Bathers, showing awkward adolescents in swimsuits, New Mothers, documenting women minutes after giving birth, and others recording military recruits on their first day of induction and child refugees newly displaced, she exposes subjects at moments that capture the poignancy of their transition and transformation. To suggest both the self-conscious and the unconscious self, Dijkstra concentrates on gazes, poses, and gestures that project an uncertain mix of confidence and vulnerability.

Exemplifying Dijkstra’s subtly revealing portraiture, Odessa, Ukraine, August 11, 1993 presents a young boy in shorts and sandals who clutches two unclothed dolls to his bare chest. Standing in front of an urban stone wall, he is smeared and dusted with street dirt, his tan skin offset by the dolls’ pale pink bodies: their pert plastic smiles and bright eyes call attention to his comparatively stone-faced expression. Juxtaposing the childhood joy implied by the toys with a premature resignation glimpsed in her subject, Dijkstra hints at the fragility of hope, the fleetingness of youth, and an innocence soon to be lost.

Philip-Lorca diCorcia (Born 1951 in Hartford, CT) has been acknowledged as one of the most innovative and influential photographers of the past thirty years. Often labeled a member of the so-called Boston School (he attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts with David Armstrong and Nan Goldin), he has created a highly individual and influential body of work that spans documentary photography and staged tableaux linked to postmodern image construction. Known for their taut cinematic quality, his photographs build on the tension between fact and fiction, and stillness and flux, to picture the uncertainty, even contingency, of life on the threshold.

Ralph Smith; 21 years old; Ft. Lauderdale, Florida; $25 exemplifies diCorcia’s subtle yet incisive reflection on the currencies of fantasy and desire. With grant money from the National Endowment for the Arts, diCorcia made multiple trips to Los Angeles, where he scouted locations, staged scenarios, and located male prostitutes on Santa Monica Boulevard who agreed to pose for his camera for the same fee they would receive for their more typical service. As curator Bennett Simpson writes, the image shows “a movie-star handsome man seated on a patch of grass in front of a Del Taco drive-through sign. It is night, and the man appears to be waiting, possibly bored or deep in thought. In a sense he blends in perfectly with his surroundings: an advertisement for some fantasy, a product for sale, another fragment in L.A.’s landscape of come-ons. Even as car lights smear by in darkness, the man’s face—like the fast-food sign—remains perfectly still, a figure of desire raised out of its moment to stand for a more universal instability.”

The ICA/Boston collection includes numerous works by Boston School photographers, and the addition of this print enriches the museum’s capacity to tell the history of Boston art and artists. Furthermore, this work offers a bridge between the controlled approach of diCorcia’s early work and the flux and spontaneity of his later Streetwork series (represented in the ICA collection by Igor, 1987, and London, 1995). A major survey exhibition of diCorcia’s career was held at the ICA in 2007.