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.
Having toured the world with Wilco, The Autumn Defense, and other acts, Sansone has cultivated a flaneur’s appreciation for the act of wandering, ever open to encounters with overlooked beauty. He further honed this skill during the pandemic, taking long solitary drives through the American south, stopping along the way to perambulate, and, in the process, creating a noteworthy body of patient and considered street photography.
With William Eggleston he shares 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.
With Noticings, Sansone creates a portrait of a country defined by the tension between the vestigial and the vanished.
