NOTICINGS (2019-2021)
Photography by Patrick Sansone
Clothbound hardcover
160 pages, 136 Color Plates
First Printing/Edition of 500
Published by Sansonica Books
With his second monograph Noticings, musician and photographer Patrick Sansone collects 136 color images made between the winter of 2019 and the summer of 2021. As evidenced in 2010’s 100 Polaroids, Sansone’s eye has long been drawn to the detritus of small-town midcentury Americana, but as he’s moved from instant to 35mm and medium format film so, too, have the conceptual valences of his images grown and sharpened. The weathered signs, shuttered storefronts, and vacant lots which populate many of his photographs take on a new resonance in light of the Covid-19 lockdown, as though the slow decay of the American dream had suddenly metastasized and spread outward from the heartland.
On long solitary drives through the American South, Sansone would stop to perambulate through small towns along the way, creating a formidable body of patient and considered street photography. He shares William Eggleston’s impeccable eye for color and light, and similarly views the world as a Duchampian readymade: rife with resplendence simply awaiting the click of a camera’s shutter. In his elliptical approach to the human element, however—by, essentially, depicting through omission—Sansone aligns himself with William Christenberry and the New Topographics. To these influences, he adds a twilight sensibility of having-been, an oblique commentary on the socio-economic underpinnings of these now largely abandoned spaces that once could have been photographed as thriving hubs by the likes of Stephen Shore, Ernst Haas, or Fred Herzog.
Just as he transmutes a verb into a noun for the title of Noticings so, too, does Sansone digest and distill the act of seeing, creating images which depict—alongside their ostensible subjects—perception itself. In what Sansone chooses to show us and, more importantly, to withhold, his photographs recall Jeffrey Eugenides’ description in The Virgin Suicides of the departed Lisbon sisters: “In the end, we had the pieces of the puzzle, but no matter how we put them together, gaps remained, oddly shaped emptinesses mapped by what surrounded them, like countries we couldn’t name.” In Noticings, the country is easily named, but remains defined by the tension of the vestigial and the vanished.
— Christopher Bruno
