In 2003, the photographer Christian Patterson walked into a family-owned grocery store in the Mississippi Delta and found the shelves still stocked with products that had expired years earlier. The store, Gong Co., gave its name to the book Patterson would make over the next two decades. He photographed it first as a working business, then, after its doors closed in 2013, as a sealed interior, returning periodically until the building was gutted in late 2019.

Gong Co., published by TBW Books in 2024, gathers 164 color plates across 224 pages. Patterson moves between on-site and studio photographs, monotypes, trompe l’oeil collages, and handwritten notes, so that documentation keeps sliding into something more deliberately composed. The store’s merchandise, signage, and slow physical decline become raw material for images that test where observation ends and invention begins, a method with clear affinities to Duchamp’s readymades and Dieter Roth’s accumulations of everyday matter.

The book is conceived as an object in its own right: a casebound hardcover with a French fold jacket and printed edges, its green cloth cover wrapped in a brown paper jacket styled after a grocery sack. Foxing and mold-like marks are incorporated throughout its pages, mimicking the effects of southern humidity and making the volume appear to age as it proceeds. The result is a sustained meditation on impermanence and on the American South as a photographic subject, a terrain Patterson approaches with full awareness of the writers and photographers who defined it.

For collectors, the interest lies in that convergence of subject, sequencing, and design—a long-term project whose printed form carries the same weight as the photographs it contains.