American ruins / Camilo José Vergara.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Vergara, Camilo José.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Inner cities--United States.

Inner cities.

United States.

Inner cities--United States--Pictorial works.

Genre:

Pictorial works.

Illustrated works.

Physical Description:

224 pages : illustrations ; 29 cm

Place of Publication:

New York : Monacelli Press, 1999.

Summary:

Photographer and sociologist Camilo Jose Vergara has devoted his career to documenting the transformation of the American inner city, particularly the physical devolution of the built environment in some of the nation's most notorious ghettos. His use of time-lapse photography shows once-sturdy structures as ghostly ruins and then as empty lots or flimsy new structures. For this study, he traveled to more than 60 sites in New York; Camden, New Jersey; Newark; Philadelphia; Baltimore; Chicago; Gary, Indiana; Los Angeles; and, most notably, Detroit. From South Bronx to South Central, from Newark's Central Ward to the once-elegant Detroit neighborhood of Brush Park, Vergara's project combines the aesthetic impact of the nation's ruins with a meditation on the "other America" in the tradition of Jacob Riis and Michael Harrington.

The author visited the magnificent structures of the nation's industrial past (factories, banks, breweries, and office buildings) and accompanying civic and residential edifices (corporate skyscrapers, libraries, churches, cemeteries, and houses) to attest to their neglect, dissolution, disappearance -- and occasional replacement. Yet he is also sensitive to the rich variety of responses that urban decay has elicited at the local level: grass-roots political activism, careful architectural preservation, and dazzling displays of artistic creativity, Vergara's remarkable photographs and commentary amount to a scaling critique of national indifference to the plight of the inner city and the nation's past as well as unflinching documentation of such sites in the course of their deterioration.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN:

1580930565

OCLC:

41565199