Harlem: The Unmaking of a Ghetto(Historical Studies of Urban America)

For more than a century, Harlem has been the epicenter of black America, the celebrated heart of African American life and culture - but it has also been a byword for the problems that have long plagued inner-city neighborhoods: poverty, crime, violence, disinvestment, and decay. Photographer Camilo Jose Vergara has been chronicling the neighborhood for forty-three years, and Harlem: The Unmaking of a Ghetto is an unprecedented record of urban change. Vergara began his documentation of Harlem in the tradition of such masters as Helen Levitt and Aaron Siskind, and he later turned his focus on the neighborhood's urban fabric, both the buildings that compose it and the life and culture embedded in them. By repeatedly returning to the same locations over the course of decades, Vergara is able to show us a community that is constantly changing - some areas declining, as longtime businesses give way to empty storefronts, graffiti, and garbage, while other areas gentrify, with corporate chain stores coming in to compete with the mom-and-pop shops. He also captures the ever-present street life of this densely populated neighborhood, from stoop gatherings to graffiti murals memorializing dead rappers to impersonators honoring Michael Jackson in front of the Apollo, as well as the growth of tourism and racial integration. Woven throughout the images is Vergara's own account of his project and his experience of living and working in Harlem. Taken together, his unforgettable words and images tell the stories of how Harlem and its residents navigated the segregation, dereliction, and slow recovery of the closing years of the twentieth century and the boom and racial integration of the twenty-first. A deeply personal investigation, Harlem will take its place with the best portrayals of urban life.

About the Author :
Camilo Jose Vergara is a photographer and writer, a MacArthur fellow, and the author of many books.

Review :
"Camilo Jose Vergara has watched--and photographed--Harlem as it fell apart and then rose back up as something else. He chronicles the passage from poverty to selective luxury, from segregation to selective integration, from street life to tourism. He asks the unanswerable question: Which is preferable?" --Luc Sante, author of Low Life "Despite the singularity implied by the book's title, Camilo Vergara shows us many Harlems, all of them in motion. His still photographs paradoxically enable us to see change by revealing the lingerings and premonitions of an evolving city. He points his camera forward (and backward) in time, not just in space. The result is a fascinating four-decade compendium of visual narratives, reflexively and reflectively assembled by someone acutely aware of his own semi-tolerated presence." --Lawrence Vale, author of Purging the Poorest "Since the 1970s Camilo Jose Vergara's photographs have defined the American urban crisis, and the urban recovery insofar as that has occurred. His images have given rise to a whole international school of urban photography (even if his direct influence is not always acknowledged). He is the Lewis Hine of our time. Vergara has also marched to a different drummer, standing apart both from academic and art-world fashion, and from the celebration of 'the community' over the hard truths of the inner city." --Robert Fishman, Taubman College of Architecture and Planning, University of Mich "Wandering the streets of Harlem for the past forty years, Camilo Vergara has noticed and miraculously recorded those moments of great human invention that have been largely overlooked by the official chronicles of architecture and urban history. For this reason, his photographs are unique and indispensable." --Ben Katchor, author of Hand-Drying in America