The New American Ghetto - Softcover

Camilo Jose Vergara

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0813523311 ISBN 13: 9780813523316

Publisher: Rutgers University Press, 1997

Synopsis

Vergara has chronicled life in poor and minority communities across the United States in the New York Times, Atlantic, the Nation, the Village Voice, and other publications. Following in the footsteps of 19th-century urban reformer Jacob Riis, the author, through the power of photography, reveals the destitution and vulgarities of urban decay. Chicago; Newark, New Jersey; New York; Detroit; Los Angeles; and several other cities are the backdrops for his 400 photographs. Vergara focuses on the physical environment, showing the transformation of particular sites over time. His tour of dilapidated neighborhoods and crumbling downtowns is visually startling. Vergara lays bare the direction of a new urbanness that strips the grandeur from its fabric and lays waste to the cityscape, pointing out that while we have wasted cities, many of the ruins are magnificent. An invaluable resource for urban studies and architecture collections.

About this title

About the Author:

Camilio Jose Vergara received his M.A. in sociology from Columbia University and is co-author of Silent Cities: The Evolution of the American Cemetery. In 1993, his work was the subject of a BBC documentary. He is the recipient of several awards, including grants from he New York Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. His photographs have been widely exhibited here and abroad, and portions of his archives are represented in the collections of Avery Library at Columbia University, at the Getty Center, and at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. The author lives in New York City.

Review:

"A brilliant and upsetting book, written with poetic elegance and power, and accompanied by some of the most stunning and sensitive photographs I've ever seen in a book about our cities." -- Jonathan Kozol, author of Savage Inequalities: Children in American's Schools

"A national photographic family album of loss... Vergara has a sharp eye for the human hand." -- The New York Times

"As has no other writer or photographer, Camilio Jose Vergara tells the story of the new American ghetto' from the inside out. Devastation, hope, violence, love, and absurdity all emerge from Vergara's brilliant elegy on the ruins of a once great civilization." -- Michael B. Katz, Stanley I. Sheerr Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania

"Just as Jacob Riis's photographs and words have preserved the underside of the slums at he end of the nineteenth century, the work of Camilio Jose Vergara will perform the same function for the end of the twentieth century." -- Kenneth T. Jackson, Barzun Professor of History and the Social Sciences

"Singularly unforgettable photography." -- Chicago Tribune

"Unlike any ghetto photos you have ever seen." -- The Detroit Free Press

"Vergara's work records not only urban decay but the efforts of the dispossessed to resist it and to claim their neighborhoods... [It] is, fundamentally, work of memory, a record of loss." -- The Nation

[Vergara's] images of inner cities hit hard without being sentimental... For those who don't spend much time in poor neighborhoods, this book should be required looking." -- Planning

About this edition

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0813523311
• ISBN 13: 9780813523316
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256