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's 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.

Born in 1948, Patterson moved from Calgary Canada to New York City in 1979 and since 1983 has lived in a building that he and his companion of 35 years, Elsa Rensaa, bought on Essex Street. Starting in 1986 it also served as the home of the Clayton Gallery and Outlaw Museum, showing artists outside the mainstream. Trained as artists, but consciously side-stepping the confines of the art world, they were in the spotlight of the vogue for many years for their custom made and personalized embroidered baseball caps that were sought by the cognoscenti and celebrities. An ardent community advocate, Patterson also co-founded the New York Tattoo Society and helped win the fight to legalize tattooing in the City.

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, in what 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 subcultures and underworlds. 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. His photographs show us an unedited humanity upfront and close-up. Each picture represents a door to a fascinating story, one that Patterson 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 film 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 - segments of which will be on view in the exhibition.