Signed, Patrick Sansone - Noticings - 2025

Comprising images made between the winter of 2019 and the summer of 2021, Noticings is the second monograph by musician and photographer Patrick Sansone. Arriving fifteen years after his book 100 Polaroids, Noticings represents a refinement and expansion of the thematic and aesthetic concerns established in that first self-published volume. Noticings is still a decidedly analog affair, but as Sansone has moved from instant to 35mm and medium format film, so too have the conceptual valences of his images grown larger and sharper.
Sansone’s eye has long been drawn to the detritus of small-town midcentury Americana; but as refracted through the lens of the Covid-19 lockdown, the weathered signs, shuttered storefronts, and vacant lots which populate many of his photographs take on a new resonance, time-stamped and yet timeless, as though the slow decay of the American dream had suddenly metastasized and spread outward from the heartland.
Having toured the world with Wilco, The Autumn Defense, and other acts, Sansone has cultivated a flaneur’s appreciation for the act of moving purposefully and perceptively through spaces, ever open to encounters with overlooked beauty. With much of the world on pause during the pandemic, Sansone nonetheless remained in motion, taking long drives through the American south, stopping to perambulate through small towns along the way and, in the process, creating the body of work represented herein. But his is not a typical street photography, as the practice has come to be understood; it is more patient and considered. Just as the title Noticings takes a verb and repurposes it as a noun, so too does Sansone digest and distill the act of seeing, creating finely observed and executed images which depict, alongside their ostensible subjects, perception itself.
With William Eggleston he shares Mississippi and Tennessee roots, an impeccable eye for color and light, and an unyielding belief in the world as 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 image-makers like 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 half a century ago would have likely been photographed as thriving hubs by the likes of Stephen Shore, Ernst Haas, or Fred Herzog.
Sansone’s pictures rhyme with, rather than repeat, the work of these photographic masters -- new growth from fertile ground. In what Sansone chooses to show us and, more importantly, to withhold, his photographs recall Jeffrey Eugenides’s 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.

by Christoper Bruno