Patt Blue is an American Documentary Photographer, memoir writer and photographic educator. Southern born and bred, Ms. Blue adopted New York City as her home, and lived there from 1974-2004. Her art works focus on the human psychological and emotional underside. The University Press of Mississippi published her hybrid social memoir with photographs, “Living On A Dream: A Marriage Tale.” Her current works are photographs with words. She was on the founding staff of The International Center of Photography; developed photo essays for LIFE Magazine; a member of the photo agency Archive Pictures; tenured Assistant Professor of Fine Arts at Kean University of NJ; the recipient of many awards and artist residencies: The Leica Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, The New York Foundation for The Arts, MacDowell, Lightwork, and others. Blue has a BA in Fine Arts from SUNY Stony Brook and MFA from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago. Public Institutions hold her work in their collections including, The New York City Public Library, The Museum of The City of New York, and The Brooklyn Museum.
"The Fall series came to me in a trance as I walked one late fall day under a gray metal sky where cows once pastured. The time marks a visit with friends on their small family dairy farm in Narrowsburg, NY. After three generations, the farm had economically failed and the fifty cows were sold. Upon entering the dark and silent barn, I was felled by the memory of steaming heat from the animals bodies, the sound of machines churning with milk and the munching of hay. I felt the dark ominous mingling of presence and loss. I heard the frightened bellowing girls being herded into a big truck and taken far from their home to some dubious fate. The visible cloud of breath coming from my own living body, reminded me of my own fated demise. As I roamed and photographed freely in the field and forest around the farm, I fell under the spell of life and death as it comes to all living creatures in time.The monopoems came to me in the post-production stage of composing the series. The Fall came to symbolize the fall of humankind by the humans themselves. Poet John Clare and Albert Camus inspired my poems."