Cruising

Chad States's first monograph documents two years spent photographing the parks, public restrooms, and roadside wooded groves that gay men across the United States have used as cruising sites, gathering 80 color plates from locations nationwide.

States composites elements from multiple sites into single, lush landscape compositions; the men who appear read as small, partial figures folded into dense foliage and shadow rather than posed as portrait subjects, and the book moves gradually from empty clearings toward these more populated scenes. The approach invites comparison to Kohei Yoshiyuki's The Park, though critic Vince Aletti observed that States's subjects read as more solitary than furtive, and the pictures stop short of sensationalism. The volume includes texts by geographer Gordon Brent Ingram and photographer Alec Soth, and it was shortlisted for the Aperture Foundation/Paris Photo First PhotoBook Award in 2012.

The book was States's debut monograph, published by powerHouse Books in 2011. Its inclusion in Surveillance Index Edition One (2016) follows the anthology's own logic, gathering photographs built from scanning open landscape for hidden, half-concealed human activity.