September 10, 2007
Clayton Patterson - The Lower East Side
September 10 - October 27, 2007
Kinz, Tillou + Feigen
Patterson has been a ubiquitous presence of the Lower East Side of Manhattan since the early 1980's, and is widely known for his dedicated documentation of this historic and now fast changing neighborhood (i.e. vanishing neighborhood, courtesy of Mayor Bloomberg and City Planning co-conspirator Amanda Burden's campaign of development solely for the sake of developers). He has been a conscientious chronicler of this urban magnet for the disenfranchised that has long been recognized for its creative influence far beyond its humble street corners.
Patterson has created an extensive and always expanding photo and video archive of the Lower East Side. He has continually taken portraits of people posed in front of the graffiti-scrawled door to his safe haven storefront, to then be displayed in the window that the local kids dubbed the "Wall of Fame". He was there in 1988 during the Tompkins Square police riots (and has been arrested more than a dozen times for photographing the police), and he was at the closing concert of CBGB's in 2007. The New York Times describes Patterson's endeavor as such:
He has amassed a huge day-by-day visual history of the area, told mainly through unpretentious portraits of its myriad and diverse faces: tenement kids and homeless people, poets and politicians, drug dealers and drag queens, rabbis and santeros, beat cops, graffiti taggers, hookers, junkies, punks, anarchists, mystics and crackpots.
This is a collection of photographs unequaled in its power to portray the people and times of a unique neighborhood that has become synonymous with American underworlds and subcultures. Patterson is a street photographer in the tradition of Weegee and Gary Winogrand, but his project is so life-encompassing that it is perhaps more akin to some outsider or conceptualist obsessively documenting one's environs. Patterson's photographs show an unedited humanity upfront and close-up. Each picture represents a door to a fascinating story, one that he can annotate with a sharp recollection and sensitive perspective.
He has also published two well-received anthologies: ''Captured: A Film/Video History of the Lower East Side,'' 2005, and "Resistance: A Radical Political and Social History of the Lower East Side," 2007. Two more anthologies are in the works: "Jewish History of the Lower East Side," and "Tattoo and Body Art in New York City". A documentary on Patterson and the Lower East Side titled "Captured" by Dan Levin, Ben Solomon and Jenner Furst is seen much through Patterson's lens and will soon be premiered with screenings worldwide. Excerpts of the film will be on view during the exhibition.
Kinz, Tillou + Feigen
529 West 20th Street, NYC
Posted by Trigger Magazine at September 10, 2007 9:45 AM Permalink
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