Sunday Drive is Luke Smalley’s third book, a photographic novella about small-town youth and the consequences of choices. Girls prepare and grow anxious; boys wait in a different kind of unease. The project places these situations beside each other, allowing the distance between them to become part of the story. Its title suggests an ordinary excursion, while the surrounding details give that apparent simplicity a more complicated emotional setting.

Humor runs through the account. Smalley’s interest in the girls’ concern about what to wear is set against the boys’ predicament. Clothing becomes more than a matter of taste when a visitor’s dress code introduces restrictions on what can be worn. The published project description includes visiting hours and a list of prohibited garments. These details provide a framework of waiting, preparation and rules around the people in the photographs, connecting ordinary decisions to a situation they cannot simply determine for themselves.

Twin Palms published the hardcover in November 2009. The book contains 48 pages and 30 four-color plates, with an 8-by-11-inch format. Its compact extent brings the project into a form that can be read as a sustained photographic narrative. Smalley’s photographs carry the account, while the accompanying description establishes the interplay of anticipation, boredom and consequence that gives the book its subject.

The novella offers a way to consider how small actions acquire meaning through their circumstances. Getting ready, waiting and choosing clothes are familiar activities, but their significance changes when they are placed beside another person’s predicament. A reader can follow that relationship without expecting the photographs to reduce it to a single lesson. The humor and unease can remain present together.