Patrick Gookin’s Surface Relations: Book Release at Sunday Takeout

In Surface Relations, views of isolated pedestrians, parking lots, suburban lawns, advertisements and sad trees compile in an unsentimental catalog of the everyday. The photographs may preserve that which is overlooked, or, if noticed, quickly forgotten—but without suggesting that these moments hold hidden value making them worthy of a greater depth of attention. Instead, the detached, roving gaze of a driver dulled to the world by the routine of commuting slides over Los Angeles’ automotive landscape and the people who live within it, finding little worth beholding. Surface Relations is a photographic project originating at the intersection of three revolutionary advances—the automobile, the phone and the camera—that nonetheless consists of images so ordinary that they can be uncomfortable to look at.