Christian Patterson Archives

Decay in America

A time-warped book-object of dust, detritus and déjà vu, Christian Patterson’s GONG CO., published by TBW Books and Éditions Images Vevey, with a recent exhibition at Robert Morat Galerie in Berlin, stages the slow decay of a family-run grocery store in the heart of the Mississippi Delta. Weaving the personal into a broader reflection on how images collapse time and space, Peter Watkins approaches it as a work that mourns and animates the past simultaneously: a meditation on surface, obsolescence, corporate homogeneity’s erosion of the singular and the distant engagement with a mythologised idea of ‘America’ from afar.

Peter Watkins | Exhibition/photobook review | 22 May 2025

For weeks, Christian Patterson’s weighty new book, GONG CO., lay unopened on my desk, its cellophane sleeve untouched, waiting for a moment that felt right. His previous two books – Redheaded Peckerwood (2011) and Bottom of the Lake (2015) – became immediate hits, during a period of peculiarly energetic and experimental book publishing within photography. While presenting his books to students recently I was reminded that, despite my best intentions, I still haven’t called the associated telephone numbers linked to his appropriated telephone book Bottom of the Lake – numbers which provide a portal to the artist’s hometown, and consist of archival sound, field recordings and performances. It’s perhaps unsurprising, then, that I’m taking my time here too.

Removing the book from its brown kraft paper dust jacket, its weathered green, clothbound cover and stained page edges provoke an attention to materiality and to surfaces. This book-cum-object felt strangely reminiscent of a forged tax ledger once fabricated by my teenage employer in the polytunnel of our local garden centre – the book of fictional numbers, nestled roughly in amongst soily platforms of hardy plants, was given the occasional watering and blasts of sporadic British sunshine before attaining a believable enough patina to be presented to straight-backed tax inspectors. Patterson’s book, too, is about surfaces: stories of Americana wrapped in the packaging of nostalgia, commerce and eventual ruin.

Patterson’s work has always operated at the intersection of fiction and documentary, and GONG CO. is no exception. This body of work, developed over a period of two decades – photographic, graphic and humorously symbolic – points us somehow to the forces of late-stage capitalism; the slow death of small businesses, such as the general store featured here, along with all their idiosyncrasies and sense of otherness. The publisher TBW Books writes: ‘It was like an unintentional time capsule, and an uncanny fulfilment of Andy Warhol’s prophecy that “someday, all department stores will become museums, and all museums will become department stores.”’

The book and Patterson’s recent solo exhibition at Robert Morat Galerie in Berlin are layered with constructed still lifes, object curiosities and interior views of the shop itself. Text-based works framed neatly in cardboard mix with photographs of aged commercial newsprint, and evidence of shop detritus accumulated over decades. In the exhibition, two seductively large prints feature photographic reproductions of old newspapers covering the shop windows, backlit from the outside world. This play of interiority and exteriority is echoed and expanded upon in the narrative unfolding of the book itself. Standing in front of the work, I overhear Robert Morat explaining the technical process in German to a visitor: this backlighting isn’t just an aesthetic choice but a way for us to begin to understand the wider work itself. I look down, and beneath one of these framed photographs, a dog-eared rat trap hugs the wall: ‘Can’t Miss,’ reads the trap, but the trap has already been sprung. The victim is notably absent.

These works are all surface and seduction – the gleam of impossibly dustless anti-reflective glass, the surgical precision of the walnut frames – somewhat antithetical to the content of the works, but make for deeply satisfying art work commodities in and of themselves. One recurring theatrical motif is hands presenting various objects to the camera, this time a stopped watch, which becomes a synecdoche for time itself: artificial, commodified, always on display. The watch is fixed at 12:54. In another work, a white plastic clock held upside down rests at 12:57. The hands that hold them are dirty, worn – workers’ hands, but maybe more likely those of Patterson himself in a studio reconstruction. These images are symbolic of capitalism’s residues, presumably referencing the hardworking agricultural South of the Mississippi Delta, where this project was born. Or is it spelt ‘Missisippi’, as my scrawled first draft read? My misspelling whilst hurtling back on the train between Berlin and Prague becomes part of what I’m trying to get at. These images point toward a place that is as real as it is imagined. For many of us outside the U.S., America exists as a series of signs – visual referents to a land both omnipresent and unknowable. Patterson’s America is one we recognise not necessarily from personal experience this side of the Atlantic, but from TV reruns, movies and childhood sweet wrappers.

GONG CO. nods toward William Eggleston, not only in those bare light bulb ceiling views, but more so in the works’ deliberate lighting and colour palette. Years ago, Patterson was an assistant of Eggleston, himself based in the South, just north of the border in Memphis, Tennessee, and somehow this influence continues to shine through in a way that makes me remember why I love the lineage that photography affords. One photograph of a clapboard house, boarded up and vacant, reads like a façade within a façade; the lighting is rich, thickly seductive, calling to mind the artificial golden hour glow of Hollywood and those flat faced film set constructions from old western movies. It is what it appears to be – and yet it isn’t. The glass from the house has been removed, and the tight crop means we have no reference to depth, no way to move beyond the building’s surface, no way around it.

This sense of staging is everywhere in the show. An aged yellow plastic racket leans in the corner like a prop or a long-lost attic find. A $2 bill is nailed directly through Thomas Jefferson’s head to the gallery wall, a store-opening ritual to bring good fortune. We’re not watching a play here, but perhaps we’re walking through the set after the final curtain. The presence of text works is notable – signs and product lists that punctuate the project performatively. ‘All Day Every Day.’ ‘Anything and Everything.’ ‘Going Out of Business.’

When we glimpse the interior views of GONG CO., you notice the forlorn shelves house objects that don’t necessarily belong to the same time period – some appear to have sat untouched for decades, others feel startlingly recent. A box of Starburst (once named Opal Fruits in the UK, to those of us who remember), an empty pack of King Edward cigars (the kind my father smoked occasionally, and let me try at too young an age), and I perhaps falsely remember a can of soup, which brings us neatly back to Warhol.

For all its rigour, GONG CO. is not cold. It’s not even really nostalgic, at least not in a tired, sentimental sense. It’s energetic with curiosity, with humorous tactility, and with love for the worn and weathered world of the everyday that might tell us something about our shared lived experience. I’m reminded of my grandmother’s long closed Laden in southern Germany, the drawers full of wrapping paper adorned with old typography and faded quaint commercial mottos, accompanied by the distinctive smell of old furniture. Perhaps there’s a kind of post-nostalgia at work here – less about longing for what can’t be recovered, more about the fascination with what that transition looks like.

After the show, I cycled through the Berlin spring sunshine and passed a building scrawled with graffiti in capital letters: ‘HOW LONG WAS NOW.’ The question felt scripted by Patterson himself. His work, like that phrase, collapses time. It’s not about when a thing happened, but how it reverberates – in texture, in colour, in loose metaphor.

In an era where replication and corporate sameness seem to swallow individuality, GONG CO. is both requiem and resistance. It reminds us that every object carries a history, every sign is part of a larger language, and every photograph – at its best – can and should be a small, still rebellion.♦

Christian Patterson: GONG CO. ran at Robert Morat Galerie, Berlin, until 17 May 2025 and is published by TBW Books and Éditions Images Vevey

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Peter Watkins is an artist and educator based in Prague, Czech Republic. Watkins received his MA in Photography at the Royal College of Art in 2014, and has since exhibited his work internationally, receiving several awards for his ongoing practice. His work is held in the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, and Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland. His book The Unforgetting was published by Skinnerboox in 2020. He is currently Associate Lecturer at Prague City University.

Images:

1-Christian Patterson, All Day Every Day, 2020

2-Christian Patterson, Bottles and Shadows, 2017

3-Christian Patterson, Coca-Cola Wall, 2013

4-Christian Patterson, Grocery List, 2019

5-Christian Patterson, Hand (a Customer Enters), 2019

6-Christian Patterson, Newspaper Window (Red), 2016

7-Christian Patterson, Shelf Still Life (Pickle Jar), 2016

8-Christian Patterson, Store Lot Tile, 2005

9-Christian Patterson, Store View (East), 2019

10-Christian Patterson, Storeroom Door, 2019

11-Christian Patterson, Storeroom Lightbulb, 2019

12-Christian Patterson, The Clock, 2019

13-Christian Patterson, Tin Side (Silver, American Flag), 2013

14-Christian Patterson, Wastebasket, 2017

15-Christian Patterson, Yellow Dog Doors, 2013

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Christian Patterson

Bottom of the Lake

Essay by Lisa Sutcliffe

Bottom of the Lake brings together Christian Patterson and Paul Schiek, both from Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, a city of nearly 45,000 people perched on the southern end of Lake Winnebago. The city’s name is French for ‘bottom (or foot) of the lake,’ from which the series of photographs draws its name. In 2006, Schiek, the founder of TBW Books and a photographer himself, began a subscription series of four annual titles, which would include both emerging and well-known artists. Patterson’s group includes Raymond Meeks, Alessandra Sanguinetti, and Wolfgang Tillmans and each book is identical in size, shape, and binding, like a periodical. Taking advantage of the opportunity to make personal and poetic work, Patterson made the pictures over two days when he was home for the holidays. The resulting photographs reveal less about the place than they do about a way of seeing. Indeed, it is difficult to discern much, if anything, about the lakeside city from the abstract and enigmatic pictures. So what do we see?

A few themes are immediately apparent and provide an outline for Patterson’s forensic methods and focused vision. Weaving together diverse visual threads, which overlap again and again, and maintaining the emotional distance he employed in the critically acclaimed Redheaded Peckerwood, Patterson challenges us to analyse and dissect his book, as if it is a problem waiting to be solved. He employs an approach that has come to define his bookmaking: multi-faceted storytelling using a specific colour palette punctured by black-and-white pictures and comprising still-life, landscape, appropriated material, drawings and objects.

Two subjects, a phonebook and a lighthouse, recur throughout the sequence, serving as a key to understanding the structure of the work through time and place. The book opens and closes with an image of the first Yellow Pages published in Fond du Lac after Patterson’s birth. Returning to the time he was born, he presents us with the page that lists taverns, many with colourful names, such as Inn-Ka-Hoots and Attitude Adjustment Hour. How can a city of 45,000 support so many bars, he seems to ask? Patterson sets out to discover which of these pubs from 1973 still exist. As his exploration progresses, we discover matchbooks from these locales posed as fictional advertisements, clip art from the phonebook, and the extant taverns themselves. Apart from the drinking culture, Fond du Lac is known for its lighthouse – a beacon on the shores of the lake. By photographing the interior walls of the lighthouse and the ‘X’ beams that support the structure itself he transforms the town icon into an unrecognisable abstraction. It is as if Patterson returned to his hometown on a mission of discovery: using the yellow pages as his map, the lighthouse as his bearing and the taverns, landscape, and ephemera as signs to be read. The contrast between how the town is publicly known (a safe harbour at the edge of a lake) and the darker connotations that come with a pastime of drinking presents a clinical response to the uncharted perils of harsh winter living.

The polysemous title, Bottom of the Lake, references the literal translation of the city’s name and its location, and also elicits a mood drawn from the deep depths of murky water. The pictures themselves are silent and cold, as if submerged. Colour is an important element in setting this mood. Patterson, who worked with William Eggleston and whose first book, Sound Affects (published by Kaune Sudendorf in 2008) emphasised the relationship between colour and musicality, is savvy in his ability to coax feeling (or the lack thereof) from colour. Both Sound Affects and Redheaded Peckerwood embraced a saturated, even acidic palette that popped against the black-and-white ephemera he so adores. In Bottom of the Lake, the spectrum is confined to a specific blue niche (between a pale sea green and robin’s egg – drawn from the cover of the 1973 Yellow Pages) as if Patterson had translated the crystallised mist of a cold winter day from the air onto emulsion. Each page has only the essential colours against a wood grain that sets the neutral tone – and even the black-and-white pictures are stark, cold, flinty, and crisp.

The taverns, all in black-and-white, enhance this sense of coldness. Often dark and run down, the buildings show their age: a distinct American type, decrepit, with peeling paint and dripping icicles. We never see the interiors or the patrons that keep these establishments in business. The snowdrifts in the foreground build an extra barrier between us – distancing us further from their warmth. It seems as if we’re on a midnight tour, and signs of life are distant or hidden. The depiction of these buildings as aged and frozen evokes both the passage of time and the impossibility of return and the simultaneous memory that remains unchanged.

The series rewards close looking; while the contextual relationships are slower to emerge, formal patterns unite the pictures. Landscapes, images of snowfall, and wood grain seamlessly interweave the progression. Many of the pictures refer to the lighthouse and the landscape surrounding it: the stone monument at its base and the cornerstone, so worn that it no longer reveals the 1933 date the lighthouse was built. These abstract references to the landmark have resonance for the artist, but for us they are sculptural, detached, the connections intangible. Patterson explains, “In the short period of time that I spent making this work, several motifs emerged – the colour blue, snow, stone, water and wood. These natural elements are a common part of life in this northern lakeside town. I was also interested in their abstract visual qualities, and their abilities to resemble one another. There are photographs of snow that resembles stone, wood that resembles water, stone that resembles wood, water frozen into ice, and snow melting into water.”

Bottom of the Lake is not a story about returning home, instead it speaks to transformations in vision and point of view as one evolves as a person. Patterson notes, “I now see Fond du Lac through a strange prism with many different sides – the faded, hazy views of a native, a son, a child, an adolescent and a teenager; the clearer, more discerning eyes of an adult; and now, I hope, the more perceptive gaze of an artist. I guess that gaze is more than just one side of the prism; it is the prism itself.” ♦

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Lisa Sutcliffe is the curator of photography at Milwaukee Art Museum.