Camilo José Vergara
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Camilo José Vergara (b. 1944) is a Chilean-born, New York-based writer, photographer and documentarian. He was born in Santiago, Chile.
Vergara has been compared to Jacob Riis[1] for his photographic documentation of American slums and decaying urban environments. In 2005, he published How the Other Half Worships, the title of which alludes to Riis's pioneering book How the Other Half Lives (1890). Vergara is noted for photographing the same buildings and neighborhoods multiple times over many years to capture changes over time.
Vergara 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. He received the Robert E. Park Award of the American Sociological Association for "The New American Ghetto" in 1997.
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. Since 2004, Vergara's main work has been a website called "Invincible Cities" (invinciblecities.camden.rutgers.edu).
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. "We could transform the nearly 100 troubled buildings into a grand national historic park of play and wonder, an urban Monument Valley.... Midwestern prairie would be allowed to invade from the north. Trees, vines, and wildflowers would grow on roofs and out of windows; goats and wild animals—squirrels, possum, bats, owls, ravens, snakes and insects—would live in the empty behemoths, adding their calls, hoots and screeches to the smell of rotten leaves and animal droppings." (Metropolis, April 1995).
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). His work has been published in seven books:
- 1989, Silent Cities: The Evolution of the American Cemetery. ISBN 0910413223
- 1995, New American Ghetto. ISBN 0813522099
- 1999, American Ruins. ISBN 1580930565
- 2001, Twin Towers Remembered. ISBN 1568983514
- 2001, Unexpected Chicagoland. ISBN 1565847016
- 2004, Subway Memories. ISBN 1580931464
- 2005, How the Other Half Worships. ISBN 0813536820
