Host Traven Rice talked with legendary street photographers Martha Cooper and Clayton Patterson at a live recording of The Lo-Down Culture Cast at their exhibition, Concrete Chronicles, at City Lore.
It was a full house at the City Lore gallery (56 E. 1st St.). The organization works to preserve and foster NYC’s grassroots cultures and heritage, and encompasses a Lower East Side gallery space, performances, lectures, the People’s Hall of Fame, a POEMobile that projects poems onto walls and buildings, and programs throughout the five boroughs.
They are kicking off their 40th anniversary with this show featuring these two downtown icons known for documenting the streets of the the city for many decades. The show gathers iconic and rarely seen images spanning the late 1970s through the 2000s, capturing the grit, creativity, and community resilience of the Lower East Side neighborhood.
About the show, City Lore wrote:
“Widely celebrated for their deep engagement with the city’s streets and subcultures, Martha Cooper and Clayton Patterson have each shaped how the world sees New York. Through distinct yet complementary perspectives, Cooper and Patterson, together with his partner, Elsa Rensaa, have dedicated their lives to recording the human stories that animate the city’s streets. Their photographs capture a neighborhood that became a global symbol of artistic resistance and grassroots resilience.
Cooper’s attentive, human-centered images of youth culture, street art, hip-hop, cultural traditions, and neighborhood life stand as enduring records of ingenuity and play. Patterson’s raw, uncompromising documentation of activism, underground art, and the everyday drama of tenement blocks offers a counter-archive to official histories. Together, their perspectives reveal the LES as a crucible of both community-preservation and innovation at the frontlines of urban change.”
Special thanks to City Lore’s Co-Director, Molly Garfinkel, who helped to curate the show and hosted the live event in their wonderful gallery.
You can listen to the full episode HERE or anywhere you get your podcasts and watch the full episode on our YouTube channel HERE.
