Hendricks had been toting around a camera since his adolescence in North Philadelphia. However, he gained admission to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts for his skills as a draftsman. Before attending Yale, in the early seventies, where he ultimately received both bachelor’s and master’s degrees, Hendricks made brilliant, quasi-minimalist paintings of basketball hoops and court markings which call to mind the work of both Josef Albers and Ad Reinhardt. But his main love was portraiture, an affinity that put him out of step with the heady abstraction that ruled the Yale art department at the time. This incompatibility drew him to study photography, under the tutelage of Walker Evans. Evans’s influence can be seen here and there in Hendricks’s photography—a picture of a wall of clocks in an antique store, taken while Hendricks was at Yale, could be an Evans outtake—but in photography, as in art, Hendricks was guided by his own passions. Like the seminal hip-hop-style sleuth Jamel Shabazz, Hendricks had a reverence for the attention-grabbing theatrics of urban street style. In one picture, taken on a trip to Nigeria in 1978, a man in a spotless, hot-pink ensemble and a patterned hat stands with one arm jauntily akimbo, in front of a waterlogged agglomeration of creaky shacks, a blazing figure of defiance amid his dour surroundings. In another, from 1983, a man in a white mesh T-shirt, flared jeans, and artfully scuffed white sneakers carries a gleaming boom box by a shoulder strap, broadcasting both his personal style and his musical tastes to the world. Fashion, Hendricks knew, was not simply a way to live loudly. When he heard Bobby Seale, the co-founder of the Black Panther Party, remark that “Superman never saved any Black people,” he bought a Superman T-shirt, and posed in it for a photographic self-portrait—sans pants. The picture, which Hendricks transformed, later that year, into one of his better-known paintings, smolders with a contemptuous irony but also an unmistakable pride, as if to say, “Who’s Superman now?”
Like the subjects of his paintings and his street pictures, Hendricks loved to peacock for the camera. In another self-portrait, from 1980, he wears a white dress shirt and woven tie underneath a V-neck sweater whose bright-red color matches his futuristic, wraparound sunglasses. The ensemble is part prep school and part P-Funk. A wistful self-portrait from the same year finds Hendricks in his home studio, wearing a white shirt and snappy black fedora, his right hand resting on his chest. Like Dürer in his Christlike self-portrait, or the regal Velázquez in “Las Meninas,” Hendricks here is both the self-assured master and the dandy who likes to recall the time his sister remarked, “You think you’re slick, just wait, one day a woman is going to straighten you out.” (A painted riposte entitled “Slick (Self Portrait)” suggests that he wore the label like a badge of honor.)