A native of Alberta, Canada, Patterson comes from what he described to me recently as the “bad end of the working class.” He left home at the age of fifteen, and spent a decade and a half in various art schools as both a student and a teacher. When, in 1979, he came to the Lower East Side with his partner, the artist Elsa Rensaa, a decade of “benign neglect,” landlord-sponsored arson, and government seizures had left the immigrant enclave pocked with abandoned buildings and discarded needles. But New Yorkers abhor a vacuum, and squatters, artists, and outcasts quickly flocked to the area’s cheap real estate. Patterson began walking the streets with a Pentax 125 S.L.R. that Rensaa had gifted him, taking pictures of the sex workers, poets, schoolchildren, and punks who called the Lower East Side home. The camera became Patterson’s key to the city, taking him places that he might not have otherwise gone: drag-queen and hardcore shows at the Pyramid Club, radical street protests, local landmarks like CBGB and Bullet Space, and art events like one at which the performance artist Roger Kaufmann severed his own finger. Patterson’s photographs served as plainspoken time capsules of the community. In a 2008 documentary called “Captured,” which chronicles his life on the Lower East Side, he says, “Looking out on the street is like being in an aquarium, and when I look out on the street I see this activity all day long.”
Elsa Rensaa, Patterson’s partner and creative collaborator, ready to document street action.
In 1983, Patterson and Rensaa purchased 161 Essex Street, a two-story building that had formerly housed a dressmaker’s shop. To support themselves, they created the Clayton Cap, perhaps the first example of a designer baseball hat, which was released in 1986 and featured embroidery patterns that Rensaa made using repurposed machines sourced from the neighborhood’s rapidly disappearing garment industry. The haberdashery became a runaway hit among artists and celebrities, attracting clients including Jim Dine, David Hockney, Mick Jagger, and the actor Matt Dillon. The same year, Patterson and Rensaa converted their storefront into a gallery, where they’ve exhibited the work of local luminaries such as Genesis P-Orridge, Taylor Mead, Quentin Crisp, and Dash Snow. Patterson transformed the front window of the space into a “Hall of Fame,” featuring a weekly selection of portraits from his series “Wall of Fame,” in which subjects, most of them neighborhood residents, posed for him in front of the gallery’s graffiti-covered front door.