America, a poem in our eyes
Billy Leahy on Camilo José Vergara's exhibition at the Gallery of Photography: a series of images that track, without emotion or commentary, urban change in America
American Ruins by Camilo José Vergara, Gallery of Photography, Meeting House Square, Temple Bar, Dublin 2. www.irish-photography.com. Until 30 July
A theme park based around Detroit's finest urban ruins is hardly an idea to strike fear into the hearts of Disneyland's directors down in the Golden State. But American-based photographer and sociologist Camilo José Vergara wasn't exactly trying to tap into the family holiday market when he suggested some 12 square blocks of the city's dilapidated and decaying buildings be preserved for posterity.
Vergara's idea was to freeze the sizeable area in time and prevent the historic buildings of Michigan's largest city being razed and replaced by strip bars and by-the-hour hotels. Despite putting forward a strong case for his theme park over the last decade, the Detroit City Council aren't buying in. Some members apparently see the very idea as a direct insult to the city, while others feel it is poignant example of how the past dreams and ambitions of the area were not maintained – but one too uncomfortable for its citizens to be confronted with daily.
But these areas of urban decay, with their now dysfunctional designs of living spaces and working environments, are the very districts Vergara stalks with a camera tightly gripped in one paw, a notebook in the other. In the post-industrial wastelands, Vergara darts between the decrepit city centre buildings, around abandoned lots and skulks down deserted avenues of crumbling concrete dreams to find his absorbing subject matter – the invisible city.
Vergara, like a latter-day Jacob Riis, narrows his lens on the marginalised of society by addressing the cityscapes they inhabit. The current exhibition at the Gallery of Photography in Temple Bar, which is the first of the Chilean-born photographer's shows in Europe, is a succinct overview of his practice. Organised thanks to the Clinton Institute of American Studies in UCD, the exhibition initially formed part of a lecture series on photography and the city environment, and provides a suitably academic, as well as photographical, study of the theme. This is street photography without the limiting effects of portrait images of the inhabitants.
Perhaps most famously, Vergara has produced several series of images that track social change in hyper-ghettoised communities through the constant morphing of the buildings and shop fronts of an area. Visiting and revisiting the same spot, Vergara tracks even the smallest changes over a certain period to produce a timeline of urban decay and, from time to time, regeneration. The aesthetic of Vergara's work is unusual; he prefers to photograph, in his own words, "with even light, avoiding haze, harsh shadows or rain so the images are as clear and revealing as possible".
The results are almost uniform images in terms of atmosphere, more scientific than artistic in feel. This cold air mirrors Vergara's approach to his subject. He does not campaign against buildings being bulldozed and replaced by prefabs; he resists making emotional statements on the destruction of communities and neighbourhoods in his work. In fact, probably only in one series does he editorialise – when a high-density Bronx project is demolished before being replaced a decade later with spatially inefficient two-up-two-down townhouses.
Vergara's work is based on the slow-moving, silent transformation of the neglected, invisible city as its identity – and arguably soul – is lost and replaced. As for his one campaign in Detroit, Vergara is not on a moral crusader attempting to protect the old against a tide of development – historic restoration, one feels, has never registered with him. Rather, Vergara wants to hold on to the last remaining shells of the aspirations and dreams that these buildings once stood for – a physical representation of the role his photographs fulfil.