NEW YORK - Jamel Shabazz suggests I meet him at 5:30 at the Starbucks on Spring Street in Soho, about eight blocks from where he works. "You'll recognize me because I'll have a camera around my neck," he says over the phone.

For 20 years, the 43-year-old Shabazz has gone to a 9 to 5 job as a social worker with the New York City Department of Corrections. For 20 years every day he has also taken pictures. But the two have never been separate. Looking through some of his portfolios, he points to one of his signature images -- a group of young men who had touched him.

"Not only was I taking their pictures, but I made it a point to talk to them about their points of education and preparing for their future. Each subject I got very personal with. I couldn't just take their picture -- I had to say something to them. Make them feel good about themselves, and make them think."

Shabazz is one of the highlights of Contact 2003, Toronto's annual photography festival on until May 31, as evidenced by his pole position on the cover of the show's program, and a special promotion in co-operation with the Toronto Transit Commission where half the system's subway cars are carrying posters of four different Shabazz images. For the Canadian premiere of his work, Shabazz has several appearances planned: He was in attendance for the exhibition opening yesterday at SOF Art House, and will give a lecture at the Art Gallery of Ontario tonight -- an appearance he had insisted would be contingent on some community service for youth. To that end, Light Source Photographic Collective, a not-for-profit organization, arranged a one-day photography workshop on Saturday, where Shabazz took a group of 15 teens who were pre-selected through an appeal to schools, to several stops around the city via public transit to give them a crash course in capturing the urban landscape and its inhabitants.

Shabazz did a similar workshop at home. "Everybody doesn't want to be a rapper," he notes. He'd like to encourage a new generation of photographers and artists. "The reason why I take pictures today is because I'm trying to impact young people and tell them they are special, that they have a purpose in life. That's one of the main reasons why I carry my camera. It makes me confront people and tell them they are beautiful."

His first monograph, Back in the Days, published in November, 2001, was a selection of images he took from 1980 to 1989 of the people and the places in his neighbourhood, Brooklyn, and beyond, in the process documenting the history and culture of African-Americans. He got to know all his subjects merely through approaching them with his camera. Many are now dead, including the young man whose image is on the cover of the Contact program.

"The original title of the book was Back in the Days: A Time Before Crack," Jamel explains. "I wanted to illustrate how life was before the crack epidemic came and changed everything. Once crack came, guns were accessible, violence took place, and the innocence was lost."

The upbeat mood in the pictures is marked. But it was the astonishingly confident street style of his subjects, the people and the way they were dressed when he came across them with his camera, that attracted the interest of the fashion community when the book was published. Shabazz had, in effect, captured the birth of hip-hop culture. "What would draw me to an image was the clothing, the character of a person. I always looked for people who were well dressed, because I felt if you were well dressed, you felt good about yourself and you wanted to be seen."

Subsequently, he enjoyed the attention of Vogue, The New York Times Sunday Styles section, Spin, The Face and Dazed and Confused. It was the book and a story in French Vogue that caught the eye of Toronto dental surgeon and gallery owner Kenneth Montague last summer while he was attending Documenta, the international art show in Germany, and led him to track Shabazz down for a Canadian debut. "The authenticity of that book really comes off the page," says Montague.

In the last year and a half, Shabazz has garnered an increasing amount of attention from the media and entertainment worlds. Among those who have purchased his work are Lenny Kravitz, Bill Clinton, Elton John, Leonardo Di Caprio and Christina Aguilera. The Brooklyn native has had exhibitions in Berlin, London, Tokyo, Beverly Hills and Paris, and in the coming months will show in Milan, Amsterdam and Argentina. His commercial commissions include work for Adidas, and next month he will produce his first shoot for GQ, a nine-page portfolio of street basketball players in Harlem.

In June, Shabazz is retiring from his day job assisting "broken men get their lives back on track again." He had a pretty good success rate, he says, in introducing them to music and reading.

"These men come from really bad backgrounds where they've never been shown any kind of attention. My photography has enabled me to understand them better because of confronting strangers on the street and complimenting them and making them feel good about themselves. I took that same strategy into the prison system, and I made broken men feel good about themselves, boosting their self-esteem."

But now, he says, "it's time to move on, to do something that I truly enjoy doing, and that's taking photographs."

Shabazz enlisted in the military at 16 and was stationed for three years in West Germany where he came of age. His father was a U.S. Navy photographer and passed on the knowledge to Shabazz, who first picked up a camera at 15.

"I used to take my mother's tin camera around the neighbourhood and shoot my classmates. But my passion was developed in the military, because being overseas we were homesick, and an image played such a great role in battling the homesickness. So whatever pictures we had meant a lot to us. I vowed when I returned I'd take pictures every year to recapture my life."

When he came home from the service, he applied for a job in the system and got it in 1983.

"When I returned I was older and I was able to branch out to see things I hadn't seen as a young man. So I became exposed to prostitution, and I was amazed to see women parading themselves half-naked in the street, and I wanted to document that, so that was one of my first themes."

He has accumulated a vast catalogue of images, which, grouped together in themes, he intends to include in two books a year over the next 10 years.

In June, Shabazz will release his second book, The Last Sunday in June, a portfolio of photos he has taken over 10 years of the New York Gay Pride Parade, which takes place every year on that day, in conjunction with an exhibit at his hometown gallery Kravets/ Wehby. He will follow it up with Strictly Old School, a part two to Back in the Days, with more documentary-type photography.

"I wanted to capture more of the surroundings. So you have the subject matter, but in the background you can see the neighbourhoods they came from."

With that he hopes to be more recognized in the visual arts community as a serious photographer. "I hope to have images of at least 1,000 people, who'll be seeing themselves for the first time and feel a part of history. That's my strategy."

Jamel Shabazz speaks at the Art Gallery of Ontario's Jackman Hall tonight at 7:30. Tickets are $14 and can be purchased at the door. For more information on the Contact photography festival, see www.contactphoto.com.