Front Door Book

The Front Door book is a summation of the photos taken in front of the door at 161 Essex Street, which leads into Clayton Patterson’s gallery and residence. The period represented is from 1985 to 2002. The vast majority of the photographs were of Hispanics who lived on the Lower East Side. The L.E.S. in the ’80s and into the ’90s was not the hip place it is today. For the most part, the photos were representative of people who lived in the section that outsiders considered dangerous and that was normally out of bounds for those who had no business being there.

Clayton Patterson has been a documentarian in the lower East Side of Manhattan since the 70s, the design of the book was inspired by that of newspapers. It plays with the subtle use of gutters and fonts to call out specific key elements of the text.