About Me
LauraAmy Marise Patterson is a photographer, writer and mixed media artist born and bred in the Valley of the Heart's delight - San Jose California. She is a film photographer focusing mostly on the beauty and raw reality that happens in everyday life. Applying street photography principles and techniques to even the most serious of photo shoots with clients, she channels her influences like photographers Henri Cartier Bresson, Vivian Meir and Gordon Parks. She also taps into the surrealist avant garde beauty that is inspired by photographers like Eikoh Hosoe. And Pictorial dreaminess of Julia Margaret Cameron.
Since childhood she has been writing poetry as a way of expanding and processing her understanding of the world; this was partnered with a cinematic and fantastical love for drama and how she visually made sense of what was happening around her. Having grown up with a mother who loved modern cinema and a father who loved classic cinema,she became acquainted with the cinematic language and the immense capabilities of moving images as a tool for expression. In her late teens, she began to feel that she was taking ‘snapshots’ of everything happening around her and knew the moving image was in her future. Chasing the idea of becoming the next ‘David Lynch’, she volunteered at Cinequest film festival. Her passion for cinema allowed her to be a spot on promoter and she was quickly moved from being a day to day volunteer to helping connect filmmakers with film buyers. This prompted an exciting but short lived start to becoming a filmmaker. Lacking the knowledge and technical skills for making this happen, she focused more on an accessible device that was abstract painting. This went on for a few years as art in general slowly faded into the background, where, aside from poetry it almost dried up completely. It was not until she started attending community college studying horticulture at the age of 30 that her hunger for the captured image came running forward. She took a history of photography class with a wonderful teacher named Greg Metler that forever changed her life. It was at this time that her father had recently passed away, and she was in dire need of a way to process this grief. Having been in an artistic drought for some time, studying the birth of photography and the wealth of possibilities in what it could capture, she was smitten and incredibly inspired! She then switched completely over to studying analog photography (which she did for 2 years) and consciously made the decision (rather dramatically of course) to be an almost strictly analog photographer. Though she does not make movies at this time (but trust she will!), her work reflects a cinematic drama and flair reminiscent of pre 1960’s film.
Fast forward to the present day- LauraAmy is establishing herself as a professional photographer and hopes to continue to learn, and grow with her artistic journey. Her main focus in her photography is to capture those most delicate moments that can only be captured in the blink of an eye. She believes when we capture something on film, we are given the gift of a memory to be cherished forever and she hopes to continue to keep film alive!