Camilo José Vergara is a Chilean-born, New York-based writer, photographer and documentarian. Vergara has been compared to Jacob Riis for his photographic documentation of American slums and decaying urban environments. Beginning in the 1980s, Vergara applied the technique of rephotography to a series of American cities, photographing the same buildings and neighborhoods from the exact vantage point at regular intervals over many years to capture changes over time. Trained as a sociologist with a specialty in urbanism, Vergara turned to his systematic documentation at a moment of urban decay, and he chose locales where that stress seemed highest: the housing projects of Chicago; the South Bronx of New York City; Camden, New Jersey; and Detroit, Michigan, among others.
Vergara began as a humanisticNew Yorkstreet photographer in the early '70s, when he moved to the city. This work changed significantly in the middle 1970s, when graduate work in sociology at Columbia University increasingly sensitized him to the complexities of environmental influences on social behavior. The advent of Kodachrome 64 film in 1974 alerted Vergara to the possibilities of permanent color photographic records of changing urban landscapes and their features. He began at that time to work systematically, using techniques adapted from sociological methodologies; traveling from one subway stop to the next, he would emerge onto the street and then photograph the surrounding blocks, fanning steadily outward. By 1977, he had come upon a rough approximation of his lifelong working method, returning to the same locales over time to photograph changes in the makeup of the communities in question. With more than a decade of photographs to document the extraordinary phenomenon of de-urbanization, Vergara published The New American Ghetto with Rutgers University Press, for which he received the Robert E. Park Award of the American Sociological Association in 1997. The rephotographic method, with its rigorous demands for systematic return, exact replication of vantage point, angle of view, and lens choice, had emerged originally out of the need for scientific evidence of change over time in ecological niches. Vergara's use of the technique was not exclusive; indeed, Vergara made other pictures, including of residents and smaller details. Beginning with The New American Ghetto, Vergara increasingly interwove these photographs, along with quotes from outside writers, fragments of comments by citizen-dwellers in the cityscapes he developed, and his own writing. Vergara's work was the subject of a 1999 exhibit at the National Building Museum, "El Nuevo Mundo: The Landscape of LatinoLos Angeles." The exhibit was shown later in 1999 at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution. "The New American Ghetto," an earlier exhibition, opened at the National Building Museum and was later shown at The Municipal Arts Society in New York City. After the publication of his second major work, American Ruins, Vergara's reputation was fully established; he won a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" in 2002 and served as a fellow at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities at Rutgers University in 2003–2004. The advent of sophisticated internet combinations of mapping, visual archiving, and hyperlinking have enabled Vergara to present his work in ways that can combine both the vertical and the horizontal and link the visual images to texts and databases. Since 2004, Vergara's main work has been conveyed in a website called "." Upon the news that Google Earth would allow users to compare historical street scenes, Quartz likened the development to Vergara's website and oeuvre. His projects include a continuing series of exhibitions, books, and magazine projects, including a collection of pictures of Chicago's public housing for the new literary magazine Granta. Slate and "Time" magazines have also commissioned him to produce "mines" of his work—collections that feature topics or themes, from GM automobiles to distant traces of the World Trade Towers. His eight and most recent book is Harlem: The Unmaking of a Ghetto, published in December 2013 by the University of Chicago Press. The book combines Vergara's early humanistic photographs with his long-running rephotography series of the iconic Manhattan community.
Contribution to Discussion of Ruins and Photography
In 1995, Vergara made a controversial proposal that 12 square blocks of downtown Detroit be declared a "skyscraper ruins park," an "American acropolis," for the preservation and study of the deteriorating and empty skyscrapers: The proposal launched a public conversation about representations of the city's built environment and is considered an important statement in the debates surrounding deindustrialization and ruins photography.
