The Globe and Mail's Simon Houpt looks at Clayton Patterson, who moved from Calgary to New York a generation ago and who chronicled the subcultures of his Lower East Side neighbourhood, incurring the enmity of the authorities in the process.
This week marks the 20th anniversary of the Tompkins Square Park police riot, which began at around 1 a.m. on Aug. 7, 1988, when the NYPD tried to uproot a sprawling, unsanitary tent city of homeless people from the 10.5-acre green space. But rather than merely clearing the East Village park, officers swarmed the whole area, supported by horses and helicopters, brutally attacking innocent people who had gathered on nearby streets.
While many newspapers and TV stations covered the event, only one man captured the full scope of the infamy and helped make it a turning point in the city's recent history. Across four hours of tape shot with his early generation camcorder, Clayton Patterson, a local artist and street photographer, documented dozens of instances of police brutality. After a protracted legal battle in which Patterson was threatened with 90 days in jail for refusing to hand over the original tape to the D.A., the NYPD admitted its sins (some of them, anyway) and shook up its ranks. Numerous cops were released from the force. Patterson visited Oprah Winfrey's couch to spread the news that, "little brother is watching Big Brother."
Tomorrow night, Patterson will appear at Webster Hall for a screening of Captured, a new film about his life. The documentary traces his history back to Calgary, where he and his common-law wife, Elsa Rensaa, were art-school misfits who left town in 1979 for New York, settling on the Lower East Side. Patterson, a gentle bear of a man who could pass for a member of a motorcycle gang, set out to document his adopted neighbourhood: the heroin users and hardcore bands, the drag queens and crack addicts, the immigrants and AIDS victims living in the shadows. To date, he estimates he has about one million photographs.
Patterson never had much trouble gaining access to the sort of people who might normally be suspicious of a camera in their midst - drug dealers and users, gang members, others on the margins of society - in part because he shoots without judgment. But Captured shows that newcomers to the neighbourhood - like developers putting up $3-million condos on the Bowery - are suspicious of his camera. Ever since that fateful night in 1988 when Patterson became one of the earliest citizen journalists, he has been in the NYPD's sights. Arrests are a regular part of his life.