Bio
Patti Sanford Roberts is an American fine art photographer who divides her time between the islands of Manhattan and Martha’s Vineyard. She has been creating photographs for years, and her work is appreciated by clients in both the U.S. and Europe. She completed the One-Year-Certificate program at the International Center for Photography (ICP) in New York, where she began her “Soundings from the Homefront” series.
Patti’s work is largely informed by her traditional New England Catholic upbringing, where she was the eldest of seven children and learned from a young age about “domestic duty.” Themes of childhood, marriage, and aging – the expectations, and the unraveling – figure both strongly and secretly in her photographs, through layers of meaning.
From edgy self-portraits to dark still-life images of family heirlooms, Patti highlights the off-beat, quirky aspects of otherwise mundane daily rituals of domestic life and the presumptive duty of the housewife. Her photographs are at once celebration and critique, a sideways glance at traditional roles.
Luminous natural light and the changing seascape are also passions of the artist, and she is lucky to have both on the island of Martha’s Vineyard. Patti’s work here captures the fickle moods of the sun, wind, and tides, and she is ever grateful for their gifts.
Patti's response to the Covid 19 Pandemic is seen in her portfolio "The Irony of Isolation," which features her Cherry Tree project, taken throughout the 2020 quarantine, paired with her Dive series. This is a study of isolation versus solitude. She also expresses her visceral reaction to the early months of lockdown in her self-portrait Quarantine series.