Since 1977, Camilo José Vergara has documented the transformation of urban landscapes across the United States. Trained as a sociologist, he reaches into the disciplines of architecture, photography, urban planning, history, and anthropology for tools to present the gradual erosion of the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century architectural grandeur in urban neighborhoods, their subsequent neglect and abandonment, and scattered efforts at rehabilitation. Repeatedly photographing, sometimes over the course of decades, the same structures and neighborhoods, Vergara records both large-scale and subtle changes in the visual landscape of cities and inner cities in the United States . Over the years, Vergara has amassed a rich archive of twelve thousand photographs that are a rare and important cache of American history. These images, monuments to survival and reformation of American cities, are a unique visual study; they also inform the process of city planning by highlighting the constant remodeling of urban space. His photographs have been exhibited widely and acquired by institutions such as the Library of Congress, The New York Public Library, the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York , and the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles . In collaboration with historian Howard Gillette, under the sponsorship of Rutgers University in Camden and with support from the Ford Foundation, Vergara is creating a documentary record for Camden , New Jersey , and Richmond , California . The work in progress, in the form of an interactive Website, can be seen at http://www.invinciblecities.com. His books include Silent Cities: The Evolution of the American Cemetery (1989, with Kenneth Jackson), The New American Ghetto (1995), American Ruins (1999), Unexpected Chicagoland with Timothy Samuelson (2001), Twin Towers Remembered (2001), Subway Memories (2004), and How the Other Half Worships (Fall 2005). Vergara has received numerous awards and fellowships, among them a MacArthur grant in 2002.
