- Title: Surface Relations
- Artist: Patrick Gookin
- Designer: Pony Ltd.
- Editor: Pony Ltd. and Patrick Gookin
- Printer: Cassochrome, Beveren-Leie, Belgium
- Publication date and place: January 2017/ Los Angeles, USA
- Edition: 250
- Format, binding: softcover / saddle stitch
- Size: 24 x 32 cm
- Number of pages and images: 64 pages / 64 Illustrations
- Type of printing and paper: HUV Offset Printing / Uncoated 90gsm Paper
- Retail price: 40 USD
Book description:
In Surface Relations, views of isolated pedestrians, parking lots, suburban lawns, advertisements and sad trees are compiled in an unsentimental catalog of the everyday. The photographs may preserve that which is overlooked, or, if noticed, quickly forgotten—but they do so without suggesting that these moments hold hidden value that makes them worthy of a greater depth of attention. From a dirty windshield to the graininess of a low-resolution image, the images in Surface Relations are conspicuously mediated. If a figure appears, he or she is alone; if he or she notices the photographer, it is with an intense knowingness. 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. Photographed on smartphones in Los Angeles between 2012-2016, Surface Relations is a photographic project originating at the intersection of three of the world’s most revolutionary advances—the automobile, the phone and the camera—that nonetheless consists of images so ordinary that they can be uncomfortable to look at.