Home »

Alix Dejean lives a long subway ride from Harlem. But being a resident of Brooklyn has not prevented Mr. Dejean from becoming a fixture on the streets of Harlem, where people regularly call out to him by his nickname, "Alley Cat."

For nearly three decades, Mr. Dejean, 63, a small, neatly dressed man with intense eyes behind thin silver-rimmed frames, has been an unofficial neighborhood photographer, chronicling the famous, the infamous and the anonymous.

Toting a leather bag, in which he carries his 35-millimeter Nikon, Mr. Dejean wanders from block to block, ready to snap portraits during the day and pictures at parties and other celebrations at night. "I'm the people's photographer," he said.

Mr. Dejean often photographs people in parks, on brownstone stoops, hanging out at street corners and philosophizing in barbershops. A self-styled entrepreneur, he prints his pictures on glossy paper and offers to sell the images to his subjects for about $20 each. That price is negotiable, however.

The images taken by Mr. Dejean, who said he was influenced by the photographer Gordon Parks, are reminiscent of those of James Van Der Zee, who documented Harlem during its renaissance, and Jamel Shabazz, who recorded the early years of hip-hop culture. Although his works have never been publicly exhibited, they are prized by Harlem residents, tucked in family albums and in frames on apartment walls.

"I've seen all the changing faces of Harlem," Mr. Dejean said, including the emergence of hip-hop, the violent rise of the crack epidemic and the current makeover as a result of gentrification. "You never know what kind of picture you'll get, because every day it's a whole new thing."

Mr. Dejean may be largely unknown south of 96th Street, but when he walked along Frederick Douglass Boulevard recently, he was greeted warmly by merchants, street vendors and others out on the sidewalk. A woman in a gray dress asked for his cellphone number, a group of men waved from lawn chairs and a group of tattooed teenagers shouted out his name across traffic.

Between handshakes and hugs, Mr. Dejean's photography services were requested for coming block parties, baby showers and cookouts.

"Alix is a legend," said Jeff Terry, 40, who has been photographed by Mr. Dejean many times. "He's the hood photographer, a real street celebrity."

In an upstairs office of the Victorian home in Flatbush where he has lived for more than 30 years, Mr. Dejean keeps an archive of thousands of negatives, slides and stacks of 8 x 10 pictures.

In rich Kodachrome prints, teenagers draped in heavy gold chains lounge in beach chairs in front of a housing project, couples dressed in fur coats stare affectionately at each other. A young, smiling Mike Tyson is flanked by two women, his hands around their shoulders showing skinned knuckles. Men pose proudly on a white convertible; some smile, several grimace, while others flash handguns.

Mr. Dejean pores over images of Representative Charles B. Rangel, Don King, the Rev. Al Sharpton, Diddy and Jay-Z, all of whom he has photographed through the years.

For someone who has also taken pictures of some of Harlem's rougher residents, Mr. Dejean comes from an unlikely background. He was born in Haiti into a wealthy family that once owned sugarcane plantations. His family came to New York in 1965 and settled in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Mr. Dejean studied civil engineering at City College and picked up photography as a hobby, training his lens on jazz performances in the Village.

In the early 1970s, he met Frankie Crocker, a well-known radio D.J., who introduced him to the music scene. That led to assignments from Polydor and Motown Records to photograph artists like James Brown and the Jackson Five. By the mid-1970s, he was shooting candid images of black celebrities like Stevie Wonder at Studio 54 and Muhammad Ali at the Waldorf-Astoria.

It was also around this time that he first became interested in Harlem, when he started photographing boldface names at Leviticus, a popular Midtown disco. "It was from Leviticus that I learned about Uptown," Mr. Dejean said. It was at the nightclub, he said, that he met the Harlem drug kingpins Leroy Nicholas Barnes and Frank Lucas, who, though bitter rivals, ran in similar circles. Mr. Dejean said Mr. Barnes hired him to photograph his lavish parties.

"When I first met them, I didn't know what they did," Mr. Dejean said, "but I photographed them as real people, complex people."

Exposed to life in Harlem, he began exploring its different corners and photographing people on the streets. His reputation spread by word of mouth, attracting a steady flow of customers. "Harlem is really a small world, like a family, and I know everyone," said Mr. Dejean, who is married and has two adult children.

On a recent evening, Mr. Dejean stopped for a break at Danny & Mel's Unisex, a barbershop on Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard between 142nd and 143rd Streets. He ran into David Jarvis, 36, a clothing designer, who has been photographed many times by Mr. Dejean, most recently on Father's Day. Mr. Dejean reached into the bag slung over his shoulder and pulled out a picture of Mr. Jarvis standing with his arm around his son.

Grinning, Mr. Jarvis said, "If he hasn't taken your picture, you're a nobody."

Source: The New York Times