In 2002, Patterson moved from Brooklyn, New York to Memphis, Tennessee to work with the photographer William Eggleston. In 2005, he completed his first project, Sound Affects, a collection of color photographs that explore Memphis as a visual and musical place, and use light and color as visual analogues to sound and music. In 2008, a Sound Affects book was published by Edition Kaune, Sudendorf. Also in 2005, Patterson began working on his second project, Redheaded Peckerwood, which is loosely inspired by the late 1950s killing spree of Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate across Nebraska. Photographs are the heart of this work, but they are complemented and informed by documents and objects that belonged to the killers and their victims. Later that year, Patterson moved back to New York. In 2011, a Redheaded Peckerwood book was published by Mack and named one of the best photobooks of the year by many critics. The book was nominated for the 2012 Kraszna-Krausz Book Awards and won the 2012 Recontres d'Arles Author Book Award. It is introduced in The Photobook: A History, Vol. 3, edited by Gerry Badger and Martin Parr. In 2015, Patterson completed Bottom of the Lake, a project revisiting his hometown of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. A book was published by Koenig Books and takes the form of a facsimile of the artist's family's 1973 telephone book from Fond du Lac, with Patterson's own photographs, drawings and notes inserted. Like Redheaded Peckerwood, this new work mixes large-format colour landscapes, black-and-white snapshots, appropriated and manipulated archival images, and studio still lifes. As an installation and exhibition, the work includes an interactive rotary telephone object and wooden sculpture.
Publications
By Patterson
Sound Affects. Cologne: Edition Kaune, Sudendorf, 2008..
Redheaded Peckerwood.
* Self-published, 2010.
* Mack version. Essays by Luc Sante and Karen Irvine. Includes three inserts, an illustrated booklet and a facsimile postcard.
AP CP BL – Ahorn Paper 1, Christian Patterson, Bottom of the Lake. Berlin: Ahorn Books, 2016.. Contains two interviews with Patterson and contributions by Gerry Badger, Thomas Weski, and Luc Sante. 144 pages.
2015: Bottom of the Lake, Robert Morat Galerie, Berlin, Germany.
Awards
2012: Rencontres d'Arles Author Book Award for Redheaded Peckerwood.
2013: Guggenheim Fellowship.
2015: 2015–2016 Vevey International Photography Award, Vevey, Switzerland. A grant of CHF 40,000 to realize his project Gong Co, about a closed Chinese grocery store in the Mississippi Delta whose shelves remained stocked with decades-old products.
