Clayton Patterson

The Lo-Down Culture Cast

Host Traven Rice speaks with artist and documentarian Clayton Patterson. Patterson has been living and working on the Lower East Side since 1979.

He's known for his portraits of the wide array of people representing the street culture of the LES in front of his front door on Essex Street as well as his rebellious designs for what became known as the "Clayton Cap," which he created with his long-time partner, Elsa.

Clayton is a street photographer who has always been interested documenting outsiders, renegades, activists and people creating art on the fringes of the cultural mainstream. The New Yorker has dubbed him "The Lower East Side's Folk Historian."

For a photo exhibit called “Clayton Patterson: L.E.S. Captured” in 2009, Clayton told the New York Times, “I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was capturing the last of the wild, free, outlaw, utopian, visionary spirit of the Lower East Side.”