Despite decades of decline — Detroit’s story is far from over
Camilo José Vergara’s photos catch signs of life, culture and resistance
History is often discussed in terms of its arc. That narrative device, essential to movies and memoirs everywhere, is a tidy way to engage with time as a kind of natural, cyclical progression. “History repeats itself,” somebody almost always says. Far less threatening than its alternative (accepting chaos), the reflexive tendency to bifurcate time into past and present is hindered by the fact that history, unlike in the movies, doesn’t begin and end. And the surfaces upon which we often chart its continuous movement, like the stories we tell ourselves, eventually all fade as ephemeral reflections of mankind’s unwavering self-importance.
Photographer Camilo José Vergara has been making pictures in Detroit since 1991, right around the time when the city’s economic free fall was coming under the spotlight. In the years since, this once vibrant manufacturing metropolis turned ghost town has come to be seen as the local metaphor for our national malaise — a symptom and symbol of deindustrialization’s calamitous effects, as well as a testing ground for grassroots urban renewal. While Detroit’s ruined edifices have drawn plenty of photographers seeking the drama of poverty, Vergara has taken another path in seeing the city, a process he calls “re-photography,” but that we might just refer to as commitment. His pictures, shot nearly every year since the early 1990s, counter the simplistic rise-and-fall narrative of Detroit. For him it’s never as easy as “before and after,” yet his pictures make visible in the starkest way possible the impermanence of whatever will be.
In the ghetto photography niche, Vergara is a singular figure. Eschewing artifice, his images aim instead for a kind of anti-aesthetic, falling somewhere between topographical survey photos and pre-digital real estate snapshots. It’s a deadpan treatment of poverty as a permanent specter in the American city, and one that leaves room for interpretations outside the sentimental. There are no conclusive endings here, but there is redemption, a pride of place and faith buttressed by the neighborhood churches and hand-painted murals the photographer encounters. Documentary in its most clinical sense — Vergara’s pictures are always firmly about what is in the frame — his images critique the genre in their refusal to facilitate aesthetic fetishism. Like a postmodern Walker Evans, Vergara employs a vernacular mode (straightforward, elevated perspective, loose framing) to realize vernacular forms (shops, signs, industrial structures) with startling clarity. The decay is there — indeed, it is the central subtext of his work — but so too are the ongoing undulations of culture and resistance, the liminal life of the place, which are often lost in more bookended versions of history.
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