Vergara, Camilo. Detroit Is on Dry Bones. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2016.
Vergara, Camilo. American Ruins: Energies of the Outmolded. New York: Monacelli Press, 1999.
Vergara, Camilo. “Tracking COVID.” Urban, no. 160_7 (2021)
Vergara, Camilo. “Harlem Intro.” In Harlem: The Unmaking of a Ghetto, 7–20. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.
Fishman, Robert. “Camilo Vergara’s Detroit.” In Camilo José Vergara: Detroit Is No Dry Bones, edited by Camilo Vergara, 9–14. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2016.
The deeper I dive into Vergara’s work, the more difficult I find it to decouple his work from our present political climate. For ten years now, our country have been enveloped in a political movement that is entirely premised on the idea that America is declining– and only a strongman fascist can revive it. Just this past week our economy has been roiled due to poorly structured tariffs that seek to “revive American manufacturing”. I am curious to learn more about how Vergara perceives his role, if any, in perpetuating the narrative of American decay. How has his photograph contributed to Americans understanding of their country’s status? Have his photographs helped create a sense of nostalgia for when America was the industrial super power? In my view, Vergara’s work is really a celebration of the ephemeral beauty of ruin rather than unfortunate remnants of a time gone-by. But then rises the question of progress – should these ruins be preserved as they are or repurposed for new generations? Vergara acknowledges that “Many of the industrial city’s great buildings are still widely recognizable symbols, and its products are still prized for their quality and beautiful design, It is this
aura of youth and optimism, colored by nostalgia, that represents the nation’s memories of city life in countless movies and television programs.” (14, American Ruins). Vergara so clearly sees the potency of imagery of the American industrial landscapes. But the question should we revive those landscapes, just as they were, or move forward to a more progressive future?
I appreciate these questions, your framing helped to articulate part of what I was feeling while reading. Seconding this.
Reading Vergara’s reflections and looking through his photographs, I am reminded a lot of St. Louis, my hometown. Much like Detroit (as noted in the readings), St. Louis similarly experienced a huge midcentury white flight from its downtown, leaving hundreds of abandoned buildings—homes, offices, institutions, etc. Ever since I was in high school, I’ve always wanted to do what Vergara does—photographing the city and wandering into its abandoned properties, but I’ve never gotten the chance. I was always intrigued by the beauty of urban decay (or “ruin p0rn”) but was aware that my exploration may easily become an invasion of privacy.
A quote from this week’s readings stood out to me; Vergara quoting the African American residents about white residents fleeing downtown Detroit: “if people in the suburbs liked these buildings so much, why didn’t they take them with them?”. This question is valid, and I don’t know if I have an adequate or interesting response to it, but it makes me think about consumerism versus maintenance. This is why photographs of spaces like these are so valuable and enjoyable(?) to look at: a way to capture a space and its beauty without having to deal with its maintenance; a way to “take” it with oneself without taking its problems. People (probably including myself) hold onto the nostalgia of places but don’t make the effort to actually revitalize them … I hope to do something about this with my career in the future.
I noticed repeated references to objectivity, essence, realness, and morality across many of the readings this week. This appeared in Vergara’s analysis of his own work, as well as in the analyses of others from the outside. In Fishman’s essay, he says “Photographs don’t change anything…and shouldn’t try. They’re not about morality.” Something about this sentiment feels appropriate to the way in which Vergara works. He is intensely methodological, or at least became so later in his career, and there is a systematic, “clinical” manner to the time-lapse documentation. I read this as an effort to remove the self from the act of photographing, where the strong and repeated method aids in decision-making, agnostic from your deeply subjective, perceptive (and ultimately, reactive) self. In this way, Vergara is a “stubborn witness”, not guided by an overarching artistic concept, nor a story that is immediately legible in a single frame, instead focused on letting the pure narrative of the place emerge over time.
“I was ‘no longer burdened with the belief that I had to capture moments that seemed “blessed, harmonious, eternal’, I embarked on the more prosaic undertaking of using images as a tool for recording and understanding the changing city.”
This is how Vergara describes his work in “Harlem: The Unmaking of the Ghetto”. He seems to be in pursuit of the essential quality of the city, not the novelty and radical exposés that Riis sought. Vergara makes several mentions of the vernacular, not only regarding architecture, and it reminded me of an Adam Caruso essay, “In Good Faith”, where he describes vernacular construction as non-architectural because it is not self-conscious. That is, it is not preoccupied with carrying the meaning of an abstract concept. It is not about appearance but rather about presence. To me, this is what Vergara is seeking: photography of the city that is about presence, photography that is pure, objective documentation. The resultant work allows for the slow and quiet storylines of place to emerge, and this is where he seems to find hope and optimism in urban dereliction.
I was really fascinated by the reading, Detroit is on dry bones, because of its framing of Detroit as this city of ruins. Ruins are typically associated with structures and cultures lost to antiquity however, Vergara subverts this trope. The industrial boom and its subsequent crash left many American cities hollowed out shells of their former glory. In many ways this phenomena mirrors the collapse of civilizations in the past. Detroit, as Vergara presents it, is a powerful case study—a city pushed to the extreme. He writes of abandoned skyscrapers, derelict industrial plants, and “avenues of faded grandeur,” evoking a kind of fantastical, post-apocalyptic atmosphere. His writing prompts urgent questions: What happens to a city’s population when opportunity and industry suddenly vanish? What becomes of massive infrastructure built for now-obsolete processes?
The answer, in part, is stark: those with power, wealth, or agency find a way out. Those left behind remain, in many ways, trapped within the bloated corpse of a once-thriving organism. What follows is decay—striking and haunting.
However, Vergara didn’t end on a pessimistic or negative note. “Detroit is no dry bones,” the mantra—reminding us that the people “left behind” are not simply to be pitied. Even amid economic decline and urban decay, community continued to thrive. As he wrote, this optimistic mantra was meant to flood the city was messages of hope. Moreover, Vergara wasn’t just documenting decay; he was drawn to Detroit because of its ruins. To him, these hollowed-out monuments held a kind of beauty and presence.
As a Bostonian who has traveled throughout Massachusetts and the greater New England area, I’ve seen many once-thriving industrial cities brought low by shifting economic tides. It’s easy to dismiss them as failed places in desperate need of complete revitalization. And while there’s some truth to that, there’s also a certain beauty and value to be found in these modern ruins.
One of the things that stuck with me most from this week’s readings was Robert Fishman’s description of Vergara’s work in Detroit, particularly the way in which he notes that the images represent the “divided metropolis,” noting that the condition of Detroit metropolitan area shows the stark contrast between the radical disinvestment of the city center and the stability and wealth of the surrounding suburbs. During my time in undergrad at Michigan, this contrast was extremely visible in every-day interactions; a large percentage of students I would meet were from Bloomfield Hills, Novi, Grosse Pointe, Rochester, and Clarkston, all major suburbs of Detroit that now house prominent corporate headquarters and supporting industries following the automobile industry leaving the city. I can’t recall meeting anyone that was from Detroit proper, despite the proximity of Ann Arbor to Detroit. Beyond the student demographics, the way Detroit was discussed in the architecture school felt akin to the blight busters discussed by Vergara and Fishman; many professors used cheap real estate in Detroit as a laboratory for their practices. While there were some loud voices in opposition, demanding a more nuanced understanding of the city and direct collaboration with its residents, the narrative of a city in need of saving was widespread
One question I have moving forward in considering Vergara’s work in the context of this class is how do people learn about the history of a city like Detroit while they are experiencing it? As a kid from the rural west side of Michigan, my experiences of Detroit were as described in American Acropolis: “Suburban families discover that the city could be a fun place to watch baseball and hockey games, throw tailgate parties, attend conventions, and enjoy the theater. Although Detroit’s population is seventy-nine percent African American, on game days the downtown population is predominantly white.” For most of my childhood, I only interacted with the version of Detroit on game days. We could go to a few of the still-open restaurants outside of downtown along a somewhat boarded up strip, but the rest of our time there was about a singular experience or event. So I am left wondering, as developers and city officials push to hide the blight and decay of the city further, covering up the uncomfortable history of Detroit, what can be done (or undone) to further the general understanding of a place?
Camilo José Vergara’s work reminded me of the City of Theodora, described in the novel Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. In both instances I found myself exploring themes of erasure and resurgence and the role that man has taken to create a perfect image in their environments. In Theodora, we are met with a city, that claims victory as the complete elimination of non-human life and the creation of a perfectly intact monumental and sterile city that hides the wounds and scars of its previous “recurrent invasions” “and “reestablished the order of the world which he (man) had himself upset” (Calvino). Where in this strategy of burying its violent history, man tries to hide away the faults and failures of its kind in a way that feels similar to the response that municipalities like Detroit have had to their “ruins”.
Through this context, I see the work of Mr.Vegara as the Library of Theordora, where in photographing these sites, he memorializes the way that memory and history linger in the architectural remnants and captures the weight of Detroit’s ambitious industrial past to create a counter-narrative that challenges the narratives prescribed by a governing body whose goal are reinvestments. Where by resisting the process of creation through demolition aimed to present an “improved cities”, Mr. Vergara stitches together a tale of resilience that shows how life continues to occupy these spaces through the traces of graffiti filled walls, and overgrown greens that call attention to the current communities who still reside there. Where investments should not be reserved for a “future clientele” but for the continued resilience of the existing communities.
Science at its core is observation over time. While Vergara may reject the title that his work borders on the realm of science, his work does involve observation as a core principle. The benefit of Vergara’s work is that he does not pretend that its objective, too often science pretends that bias is not part of the methods, but here he owns it. At times though I am curious about his broad statements. For example, Vergara wrote in “Harlem” “I felt a people’s past – their accomplishments, failures, and aspirations – were not reflected in their faces but in the material world in which they lived and which they helped to shape.” I am prone to believe that a decaying environment in a neighborhood such has Harlem does not reflect the peoples own complex lives, but more reflects the historical neglect on behalf of institutions. People have agency and shape their own world and I think that is reflected in his photography, but I am not sure these folks are fully responsible for their built environment. This stems from my own project focusing on English Station, located in an under invested neighborhood of New Haven. Activist in Fairhaven are working with the city to revamp the old power station, but I would not say they are responsible for how it is now.
The differences between institutional neglect and the world city dwellers create becomes more clear in his writings about Detroit. Similar to the Safransky book, he captures that people create their own places, meaning, and relationships in places. Vergara highlights that the ruins of a city can create an opportunity for new life. Just as the vacant lots will grow vegetation, people will use and create from what they have. The economic structures that left Detroit and created decay, also allowed room for imagination and regrowth, much of it as we have read throughout this semester coming from the people. I do think that is why Vergara’s work is so interesting, it shows people’s realities and resilience in urban spaces.
I wanted to look through a catalogue of Vergara’s images before reading the associated texts in order to generate cold-read thoughts and questions. I was immediately drawn to a group of images from Detroit that dealt with buildings largely separated from context. In these images, each building is situated on a corner, allowing the buildings to retreat from the viewer in almost textbook two-point perspective. What seems to emerge from these images is an object-ness that is both playful (with their dead-pan delivery and often graphic color schemes) and somewhat eerie (in their lack of humanity). What does it mean for a building to be pulling away from the viewer?
In Detroit is on Dry Bones, Vergara opens with the memory of a church. The description of which is highly sensorial and evocative. Immediately, the narrative shifts to one about an empty lot where the church once stood. The contrast here is intense and signifies a community shift but also perhaps a removal of an object – shift toward negative space. When thinking about this in relation to the above mentioned images, it becomes possible to think about a simple act of erasure rather than decay. The more object something appears, the easier it might be to remove it.
In Vergara’s Detroit, Fishman calls Vergara an “informed stubborn witness”. In contrast to thinking about the buildings in these photographs as things or sets for human life I’m interested in the ways in which each of these buildings operated in a similar way to Vergara himself. By reducing a building to an object, does it also become a personified character? If so, what has each of these buildings seen and how do they feel about being labeled a ruin?
The vacancy of these buildings seems in direct opposition to the narrative of Michigan Central Station, a building that was once derelict but has been “revitalized” into a multi-use giant bustling with life again. I’m not sure why I have a skepticism about this kind of project. Maybe it’s the fact that they so often feel like marketing ploys bolstered by propaganda-esque media engines or maybe it’s the spin of the “comeback” that feels a little vapid. I then think about the lonely corner buildings as something akin to public sculptures, allowing them to serve as reminders of what the community’s past narrative as the shiny forces of the future strive toward re-use.
Camilo’s work opened a lot of questions for me about the role of his work and the concept of audience. I’m curious how he navigates the balance of outsider audiences, personal artistic and emotional interest, and the interests of the communities. What are responses when he shows his finished works to people in the neighborhoods he photographed? Who are his ideal audiences? Actual audiences? How do the communities he photographs respond to not just his process of work (the daily interactions he has during field photography) but with his final products? I wonder how he notices these considerations changing since he first started this project.
I appreciated his points about which regions in Detroit choose to preserve ruins – typically not the Black and Brown neighborhoods with scarcer resources whose residents would have been banned from such buildings, or admitted only for janitorial / employment. This introduces the question of what is it that we are preserving when we decide to preserve a building?
I’m also interested in his observation about the move to the suburbs as a desire to have more control over one’s environment. In a way, the suburbs feel more restrictive – HOAs, social pressure for a specific lawn, etc. I suppose the difference is that suburbs don’t carry a physical (built) weight of history in the way that urban cores do. Something within that seems to represent a certain kind of white American attitude: ahistorical, detachment from previous generations and country-of-origin culture, viewing the colonization of U.S. as old and immutable history rather than something living and changeable.
In American Ruin, I appreciated hearing about Camilo’s personal narrative for entering the work, and what drives him within it. I’m inspired with how Camilo found his own inspiration – from many poets, and painters who “taught [him] how to photograph architecture,” and from postcard photographers, where he learned about streetscape photography. This is a welcome reminder about how the work of witnessing is informed by all types of other work.
As a sociology student, Vergara’s methodology to me was interesting in its alternative photography focus on change over time rather than capture of a singular transcendent moment. I can appreciate finding these stories of adaptation, survival, and, if not exactly beauty, captivation. The sociologist in me finds it fascinating and can appreciate the archival materials this provides, but I had similar sort of question as Robbie. What does it mean to be the “informed, stubborn witness”? What power does witnessing do? The Marshall Berman quote at the top of the American Ruins introduction speaks of urban ruination as accessing a type of ultimate reality and spiritual authenticity. Where do these come into play as actual social forces outside of the affective? What does our captivation with ruins say about us? Our relationship to the spaces we’re viewing? In a time where watching has become a central economy and way of interacting with the world, surveillance ever embedded in the everyday and mundane, what does witnessing look like or mean now?
As I conduct a photographic study of the urban environment, particularly focusing on the Chapel Street facade, I find Vergara’s works to be highly relevant. This is especially true when considering previously industrialized cities like Detroit and New Haven. I am particularly intrigued by his photographs that depict built objects in isolation, making them appear almost alien to their surrounding urban landscapes. These images reflect a profound sense of abandonment and decay, which stands in stark contrast to the ongoing development of U.S. cities. This observation leads me to question whether these structures can be effectively documented, given that cities are designed primarily for cars rather than human scale. In some of Vergara’s images and his writing, he mentions that he purposefully waits for an animal or a person to walk by before taking a picture, which provides a sense of scale. In my opinion, this approach further emphasizes that these abandoned structures appear more like objects rather than occupiable spaces, as the figures serve merely as a ruler for measurement. Another quote that resonates with me from one of the readings is: “While the United States remains a leader in industry and technology, it also now leads the world in the number, size, and degradation of its abandoned structures.” This statement is compelling because it positions abandoned structures as testimonies to the relentless and ever-renewing cycle of capitalism, illustrating how resources are sought elsewhere while older methods of extraction are left behind.
Reading through Vergara’s writings while thinking about Taesha and I’s current project for this course – the last 19th century single family home located in a now commercial district that is set to be demolished and replaced with a large commercial building, I find the difference of sentiment between a ruin being demolished and an inhabited structure being demolished extremely intriguing. In “American Ruins” Vergara writes about how he is saddened by the demolition of ruins in which the ruins themselves continuously reflect the remnants of what once was, whereas our class project, an active single-family home is also a reminder of what once was, but does not instate the same feeling of remembrance, permanence, or social history of the neighborhood like a ruin. With this, the average individual on the street may not realize the embedded history of the active home, whereas a ruin immediately projects an understanding of the neighborhood’s past. I think this may play a large part in what allows large institutions to demolish historic buildings, whether they are ruins or occupied space, because on the one hand, the general population doesn’t hold the memory of the neighborhood’s past, as Vergara states throughout his pieces, and only sees ruins as corrupting adjacent property values, etc. Similarly in our case for our class project, the home is very standard without much historic ornamentation, etc. and stands without a clear distinction of the neighborhood’s past, thus it quietly gets demolished, deleting all history relevant to what once was, leaving only traces of its history on documents and screens us to view its memory. This makes me begin to understand what Vergara calls out as “Urbanism by Subtraction…”