Camilo José Vergara

Camilo José Vergara was 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.

Camilo José Vergara studied at Columbia University and University of Notre Dame. The recorded working language is Spanish and English. The field of work recorded is photography, architectural photography and documentary photography. Places of work recorded in the authority are New York City. Work by Camilo José Vergara is recorded in the collections of Art Institute of Chicago, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Photography Collection and J. Paul Getty Museum. Distinctions recorded are MacArthur Fellows Program, National Humanities Medal and Berlin Prize.

• Born — 1944 • Birthplace — Santiago, Chile • Occupation — Photographer • Education — University of Notre Dame (BA) Columbia University (MA) • Movement — Counterurbanization • Awards — 2002 MacArthur Fellowship; 2010 Berlin Prize fellowship; 2013 National Humanities Medal

Vergara received a B.A. (1968) in sociology from the University of Notre Dame and an M.A. (1977) in sociology from Columbia University, where he also completed the course work for his Ph.D. (not yet awarded).

Vergara began as a humanistic New York street 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 (including the conversion of buildings from one function to a second, then a third, before their abandonment, and the process by which nature recolonized long-urban areas), 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. • Illustration — Sequence of 4 photographs taken by Camilo José Vergara of Fern Street in N. Camden, NJ from 1979 to 2004. Demonstrates Vergara's use of time lapse in recording a site over time. Clockwise from top left 1979, 1988, 1997, 2004. 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 Latino Los 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 (MARCH) 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 (change over time) and the horizontal (change across space) and link the visual images to texts and databases. Since 2004, Vergara's main work has been conveyed in a website called "Invincible Cities". 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. In early 2020, Vergara began a long-term project photographing the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Early images started on the country's West Coast in the Bay Area but quickly shifted to New York City and nearby New Jersey, throughout the most intense phase of the pandemic in the New York City metropolitan region. Many of the photographs are archived in the Library of Congress, and others have been presented by the National Building Museum. The photographs continue Vergara's attention to U.S. racial and economic disparities by visualizing how the pandemic is differentially experienced, with special attention to personal and built environmental adaptations to the pandemic.

* * • Vergara, Camilo José. (March 3, 2014) "Harlem Time Tracker." MAS Context.