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Undergraduate Research at UMass Dartmouth
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St., Camden” and “5th Ave at 7th Street” in which
he photographed several streets in industrial
areas of Camden and Newark, New Jersey, from
1979, the time of many factory closings, until 2014.
Vergara (2013) describes his images as “bricks
that when placed next to each other reveal shapes
and meanings of neglected urban communities.”
His buildings are not ruins, they are homes. Of all
the meanings that the ruin can hold to a removed
observer, they cannot be more powerful than the
understanding of the ruin as part of your home
environment. Even if artists photograph with this in
mind, these images of “gutted buildings can never
adequately describe the longstanding causes of
urban poverty” (Woodward, 2013). The reflective
nature of a photograph allows for meditation on the
subject, but without hearing from the people who
are living among ruins, one cannot truly understand
the basis of the ruin. Furthermore, this reflection
does not improve the neighborhood. Fetishizing
ruins does nothing for the efforts to revitalize
urban areas. Although the goal of this paper is to
understand artistic intentions and the discourse
surrounding the ruin, it is still necessary to address
the abstracted nature of ruin photography.
ruin exists in the hometowns of real people. As art
historian Lucy Lippard once remarked, “Poverty is
a great preserver of history” (Solnit, 2007, 355). It is
vastly important that we understand the complexities
of our own place in history without romanticizing
the past, but it is exceedingly important to
address the ruin not as a hypothetical but as a real
issue. The photographed post-industrial ruin points
to the American past of prosperity and unequal
wealth while also gesturing toward our increasingly
ambiguous future. The building itself cannot stand
as a reminder to this, it is not “liminal,” or “marginal,”
it is real and it must be addressed as such.
While conducting my research on the portrayal of
post-industrial cities in the Northeast, I worked
on several off-campus research projects including
one concerning the work of the renowned American
landscape painter, Albert Bierstadt, for an exhibition
at the New Bedford Art Museum.
The American perspective on post-industrial ruins
is above all else, temporal. The ruin is at once
analyzed as nostalgic, prophetic, and a timeless
symbol of failure. Tied up with our understanding
of ruins are our feelings about our American past,
our understandings of our flawed history and our
shared hopes for what the future holds. Among all
these hypotheticals, however, is the fact that the
Camilo Jose Vergara, 5th Ave at 7th Street, Newark. NJ, 1980.
Screen-shot from the artist’s website. Screen-shot taken
from www.camilojosevergara.com/Camden/Former-Camden-Free-Public-Library/1.
© Camilo Jose Vergara