What happens to a place when its purpose disappears,but its presence lingers?
In Gong Co., Christian Patterson spends twenty years asking — and answering — that question with no narration, no subjects, and almost no voice but dust. What he finds is not just the slow death of a Mississippi grocery store, but a portrait of America forgetting itself, object by object, aisle by aisle.
Somewhere south of the known maps, along a road that’s more memory than asphalt, sits a store that seems to have kept going by forgetting to stop. It was never a landmark, just a low brick building in a small town — easy to miss, easier to leave behind. But inside, the shelves held on. Not just to cans and jars, but to time itself.
In Gong Co., Christian Patterson doesn’t just photograph what was left — he studies it, rearranges it, listens to it. There are no people in this book, only their traces: a handprint, a shopping list, a half-used bar of soap. Instead of explaining what it all means, he lets the dust and the surfaces do the talking. The store becomes a stand-in for many things — a body, a business, a place. It holds together as long as it can, and then lets go.
The deeper you go, the more the photographs seem less like documentation and more like memory work. Not his memory. Maybe not anyone’s in particular. But the kind that floats up when a place disappears. It’s hard to say where the store ends and the art begins — which is the point.
One page toward the end reads only: GONE.
It’s not dramatic. Just quiet, and final.
Like the closing of a door that no one remembers opening.
