Two men standing in the building doorway were wearing shields onlanyards around their necks, but pedestrians walked past with barely aglance. Minutes later, some halfdozen uniformed New York PoliceDepartment officers converged on the block.

As plainclothes officers led a man and a woman from the building inhandcuffs, Mr. Patterson photographed and Ms. Rensaa filmed the scene. "This is what a drug bust is like," Mr. Patterson said. "You see themon TV blasting down the front door with their guns drawn, but reallyit's a very well planned, choreographed event." He crossed Ludlow Streetto speak to a small group of residents to whom the bust had seemed astraightforward occurrence.

But as he often does, Mr. Patterson perceived more than readily met theeye. He pointed out that 143 Ludlow Street was owned by Alvin Weiss,also known as Mark Glass, who was convicted in January of trying to hirea neighborhood thug to administer a fatal overdose of heroin to a tenantof a building he owned on Clinton Street. According to Mr. Patterson,143 Ludlow had been a known drug spot for years. "After you've been inthe neighborhood for a while, patterns begin to emerge," he said as heand Ms. Rensaa headed home. "There's a history to almost everything thatgoes on down here."

For the last 16 years, Clayton Patterson, 50, has documented life inthe East Village and the Lower East Side, creating an archive that aimsto define the history of the area. Since 1983, he estimates, he has shot4,000 hours of 8 millimeter and halfinch video and taken 750,000 colorphotographs of people and events there. Because of his documentation of events like the Tompkins Square meleeof 1988, during which he filmed a videotape credited by many as the mostcomplete record of the conflict, Mr. Patterson has become acontroversial figure. He has been arrested, and he has filed lawsuitsagainst the police. Some public officials say they admire his activism;others denounce him as a gadfly and a provocateur. Mr. Patterson'sachievement as a documentarian is often ignored in these debates. "He isn't exploiting the neighborhood," said Janet AbuLughod, asociology professor at the New School University and an author of "From Urban Village to East Village: The Battle for NewYork's Lower East Side," (Blackwell) "For him documenting the area islike a religion".

Despite the vastness of Mr. Patterson's archive, relatively few peopleknow about it."He's probably got the most complete library in existence documentingthe East Village and Lower East Side, but only a minute percentage hasever been seen," said a freelance photographer, John Penley, whosepictures have appeared in the city's three daily newspapers and manyother publications, and who has recorded many of the same events as Mr.Patterson. "He's out on the streets constantly, and because he knows somany people he gets great access in the neighborhood."

The archive is especially valuable because the areas Mr. Patterson hasdocumented have changed drastically over the last decade. "In thefuture, as people begin to study the times and places he documented,Clayton's photographs and film will have great historical value," Mr.Penley said. " People may not realize it yet, but how many peoplerecognized the significance of Jacob Riis's photographs when he wastaking them?"

Some 45,000 of Mr. Patterson's photographs are stored in a tall greenfiling cabinet next to his office door. The rest are in large cardboardboxes in the long, cluttered loft space upstairs. The loft is also therepository of collections of neighborhood flotsam he has assembled.There are postcards and fliers advertising art exhibits, rock-and-roll shows and theatrical performances; notebooks whose pages have beenmarked by graffiti artists and other notebooks whose pages are filledwith the signatures of people who have visited him, including the latebeat poet Herbert Huncke, and the punk rocker G. G. Allin the leader ofthe band Murder Junkies, who promised to commit suicide on stage anddied of a heroin overdose after a 1995 performance.

Mr. Patterson also has a collection of small glassine and plastic bagsthat at one time contained heroin. Orderly rows of bags are arranged inseveral black albums of the sort commonly used to display snapshots.Below each is written the location where it was found by Mr. Pattersonor Ms. Rensaa and the date.

"Many people whom Mr. Patterson has documented have been ordinarycitizens engaged in lawful pursuits. For example, in his storefrontwindow is a large wooden board on which he displays photographs ofneighborhood children posing in front of his door.

But much of his work depicts people in less prosaic settings: copsmaking arrests, junkies shooting up, drag queens performing in after-hours clubs and card games in illegal high stakes gambling dens.He has filmed fires, protests, civil disturbances and collapsedbuildings.

To do so, he has stood on the sidewalk for 24 hours holding a plasticsheet above his head as protection from the rain, entered buildingsoccupied by squatters and crossed police lines. He says he has beenroughed up by officers and threatened by members of the motorcycle gangSatan's Sinners, who thought, wrongly, that he was photographing themfor the police.

Some scenes Mr. Patterson has documented unfolded unexpectedly. Oneevening five years ago, he said, he looked out his window and saw a manbeing chased by a crowd along Essex Street. After grabbing his camera,Mr. Patterson caught up with group at Stanton and Ludlow Streets, justin time to witness the man shot by a pursuer. Mr. Patterson said hecalled 911, then drove the man to Bellevue Hospital where he had time tosnap one picture in the emergency room just before the victim waswheeled into surgery.

Neighborhood opinion about Mr. Patterson is divided. Community Board3's district manager, Martha Danziger, describes him as a competent andprofessional video technician and praises his involvement in localpolitical causes, like the unsuccessful fight to save the Pitt Streetfire station pumper truck.

Councilwoman Margarita Lopez says she has often differed with Mr.Patterson but adds that some of his work, like his documentation ofpolice brutality and his courtroom testimony on behalf of brutalityvictims, has been valuable to the community. "You can question his intensity and disagree with his point of view,"she said, "but you cannot question his ethics or his morality."

Others, though, are critical of Mr. Patterson's detachment whilephotographing grisly scenes. In 1997, John Hagan, 63, was beaten andleft for dead on East Houston Street by Pedro Diaz, 16. Mr. Pattersonfilmed the beating, the tape was subpoenaed, but told the police thathe could not identify the assailant. Mr. Hagan died from his injuriesand Mr. Diaz later confessed to the murder.

Clayton Patterson grew up and went to art school in Alberta, Canada. In1971, he met Elsa Rensaa in Calgary, and the following year they movedeast so Mr. Patterson could attend Nova Scotia College of Art andDesign, He taught high school and college in Canada before moving toManhattan in 1979. For a few years they lived on Broome Street. Mr.Patterson held a succession of jobs, including one as a printmaker inTriBeCa and another as a building manager on the Bowery. In 1983, thecouple bought the building on Essex Street where they now live. From1986 to 1993, Mr. Patterson and Ms. Rensaa designed and embroideredcolorful baseball caps, which were bought by celebrities like Mick Jagger, Jack Nicholson and the painter David Hockney. In 1985, Mr.Patterson helped found the New York Tattoo Society and, along with atattoo parlor owner, Wes Wood, won the fight to legalize tattooing inthe city.

Mr. Patterson, who usually dresses in black and wears a baseball capthat he designed and bears the Images of four skulls around its crown,is among the most recognized neighborhood resident. His store front is ahub where many locals, from Hasidic rabbis to skinhead anarchists, oftendrop in to chew over neighborhood issues, seek advice or just see whoelse might be there. His wide and ever-growing circle of acquaintancesoften ends up being photographed by Mr. Patterson and getting to knowone another.

For instance, in 1988 Mr. Patterson met the Rev. Patrick Moloney, aMelkite Catholic priest who later served almost four years in prisonafter he was convicted of conspiracy and hiding $2 million from aBrink's robbery in Rochester. Father Moloney introduced Mr. Patterson toBaba Raul Canizares a Cuban practitioner of Santeria. Later, Mr.Patterson introduced Father Moloney and Mr. Canizares to John Strausbaugh, now the editor of The New York Press, who wrote about bothmen.

While photographing or filming, Mr. Patterson has been arrested about adozen times, but only one charge against him has not been dropped. In1989, he was convicted of obstructing governmental administration aftera police officer testified that he had assaulted him with a video cameraduring the arrest of a young man who had been throwing eggs on Avenue A.To this day, Mr. Patterson insists he was innocent. Later that year Ms.Rensaa began accompanying him on some photo sorties.

During a July 1993 fire, Mr. Patterson was arrested on East FourthStreet between Avenues C and D on charges of obstructing fire fightingoperations and resisting arrest. During the arrest, two of his teethwere knocked out and he suffered a concussion and a deep gash on theback of his head, The charges were eventually dismissed for lack ofevidence, but Mr. Patterson said the incident had a chilling effect onhis documentary effort because he felt as if his work was beginning tobe more of a burden than he had expected.

That October, he filed a civil lawsuit against the city, the New YorkCity Housing Authority and three police officers, claiming that he hadbeen falsely arrested and that city and Housing Authority officers hadused excessive force in his arrest.

The city's lawyer on the case, Kate Karakassis, disputes that claim.Mr. Patterson, she said in an interview, is "very expert at provokingpeople."

"He approaches the police and challenges their authority and gets underpeople's skin," she said. "But there's no agenda to get him that I saw.He perceives that the police are after him because of his importantwork, but really he runs around and acts as an obstruction and anirritant."

Mr. Patterson insists, though, that Ninth Precinct officers have it infor him, and he traces this perceived enmity to the Tompkins Square Parkuprising in August 1988. On the night of Aug. 6, Mr. Patterson was filming in the park when thepolice clashed with park users, some of whom were protesting a midnightcurfew. For three and one half hours, Mr. Patterson, trying to beinconspicuous while carrying a video camera near his hip, weaved throughthe rampaging throng, dodging officers and thrown objects.

The next day, after watching the tape, he called a Channel 11television reporter, Eric Shawn, who in turn contacted the ManhattanDistrict Attorney's office. At first, Mr. Patterson defied the DistrictAttorney's subpoena, refusing to surrender the original tape on theground that it was his artistic property. He offered a copy instead. Hewas cited for contempt of court and went on a 10 day hunger strike inthe Bronx House of Detention before a judge ruled in his favor.

A copy of the tape was used as evidence in the indictment of policeofficers on charges that included assault and misconduct. All wereacquitted, but the Ninth Precinct captain, Gerald McNamara, wasreassigned.

`A spokesman for the District Attorney's office, Wayne Brison, saidrecently that an assistant district attorney who had subpoenaed thetape, Carol Stokinger, had described it as "very useful in theinvestigation and the trial." Police officials declined to comment aboutMr. Patterson.

Mr. Patterson also figured in another highly publicized episode in theEast Village, the 1989 murder and dismemberment of a Swiss dancestudent, Monika Beerle, by Daniel Rakowitz, a short-order cook and potdealer known for carrying a live rooster around neighborhood streets. In1991 Mr. Rakowitz was acquitted by reason of insanity and has been heldever since at Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center on Wards Island.

What drives him to take so many photographs and shoot so much footage?It is not a question Mr. Patterson addresses casually, "I felt like anoutsider in the art world of the 80's," he said one recent evening,explaining that he did not have the connections in the art world that hethought were critical to gain recognition as a painter or a sculptor."But I also felt that I understood the value of things that would neverbe appreciated by the mainstrearn culture."

He turned to documentation, he said, as a way to indulge hisfascination with people on the fringe of society and to stake out anarcane area of expertise that had largely gone unnoticed.

It was not long, he said, before he became concerned with recordingmoments that define the boundaries of authority and question its abuse. 'I'm interested in power struggles and conflict," Mr. Patterson said."And I want to be able to preserve the actual, true moment of an event.People often remember events differently, he said, and one of the bestways to determine what actually did occur in a chaotic situation is tolook at photographs or film.

"A lot of people are not treated fairly by the system," he said, "andpart of what I do is an attempt to create a balance. If people arewronged, it's tougher to brush aside their objections when a recordexists."

He insists that anyone with a camera and time to spend on the streetscan do what he does. He also says he hopes to publish books of hisphotography someday and to interest a university in housing his archive."I'd like to be appreciated as an artist," he said. "I'd like my work tobe understood, and I'd like people to realize what I've gone through."

One June night, Mr. Patterson gave a party in his storefront tocelebrate the closing of a six week exhibition of paintings by Baba RaulCanizares and Genesis Porridge, the former leader of the band ThrobbingGristle and a documentarian whose archives, which contained photographsand film footage of such figures as the writer William S. Burroughs,were seized by Scotland Yard in 1992. While a dozen or so people sippedwine and chatted, Mr. Canizares stood and, accompanied by a young manbeating a drum, sang what he called a "Cuban trance song."

Afterward Mr. Patterson walked out to Essex Street and lit a cigarette.He said that earlier that day the jury in the civil case stemming fromhis arrest in 1993 on charges of obstructing firefighters had ruledagainst him. He was dispirited. A moment later, a woman walked up andasked him to review some legal documents involving a restraining ordershe was seeking against a police officer who, she said, had harassed he.Mr. Patterson promised to look at the papers. As the woman walked awayhe said, "I don't know if I'm the best one to give her advice aboutthat."

He mentioned that he occasionally considered moving back to Canada,then quickly dismissed the notion with a wave of his hand. "There's noway I'm giving up," he said. He took a drag from his cigarette, thenstamped it out on the sidewalk. "You fight, your battles as best youcan. Then you live to fight another day. And you hope your dayeventually arrives."

Several hours after the reception, Mr. Patterson called a reporter athome. "More action in the neighborhood," he announced. He said that hehad gotten word that a local man had assaulted another man on LudlowStreet and that just as he showed up at the scene so did several policeofficers. Although the hour was late, Mr. Patterson's account of thescene was animated.