Slipstream.

Slipstream. By Patrick O'Hare. Patrick O'Hare, 2008. Unpaged, illustrated throughout, 8,25x11". Limited edition of 100 copies, signed and numbered. Special edition of 30 copies, signed and numbered, with a 8x10" C-print. Images from here.

Book description:

" 'Slipstream' is a personal exploration of ravaged landscape glossed over and sealed by perpetual development and at the same time, more vulnerable than ever to man made and natural upheavals.

It Visually lays open a culture of impermanence, architecture of the fleeting and the sense of a rootless world that could easily be swept away.

I photograph cross-sections of this modern landscape, the stations of our lives and the silence between them. I search for signs, portents and absurdities in a wasted but strangely beautiful world that occasionally offers slivers of redemption.

From helicopters skirting the edges of cities to the strip mall sprawl, many of us traverse an increasingly sterile terrain that is difficult to escape. I'm interested in what lies behind these netherworlds when they are stripped down to their essence.

I look for the hillside drive through where light and darkness fill a shape, the roof of a Wal-Mart stretched to the horizon, the sweep of roadside embankments, cleared and manicured; all the borders where earth, man, and sky meet and melt into each other.

Our unquestioning embrace of modernization and efficiency and a longstanding spiritual loneliness continue to reverberate in the tenor of everyday life. The physical effects of these forces can be seen on most any street, highway, or mall.

Our lives are played out against these backdrops as well as quiet hope and desperation. But it is here also, in the everyday, where mystery still resides and the ruins of our civilization still haunt us. My goal is to photograph the silent truths of an uncertain age: those places on the edge of a frayed world."