>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
>> Mari Nakahara: Good afternoon, everybody.
On behalf of the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library
of Congress and its Center for Architecture, Design,
and Engineering, it's my great pleasure to welcome you all
to today's lecture, "Tracking Time: Twin Towers and Motor City,"
by the distinguished American photographer and documentarian,
Camilo Jose Vergara, followed by a book signing
of his newly published book, Detroit Is No Dry Bones.
My name is Mari Nakahara.
I am a curator of architecture, design, and engineering at the P
and P we call -- Prints and Photographs Division.
I have been in this position for the last one year and nine months.
In comparison with my predecessor, [inaudible] -- he's there --
his career is, was 40 years, and he retired April.
I am still a baby.
I'm still trying to learn many things of the Prints
and Photographs Division collection, especially related to architecture,
design, and engineering, which actually pertains
to about four million items.
In my early stage of the learning,
Mr. Vergara's photographs caught my eye.
Having a background as an architecture historian
and as a former resident of New York City,
I have been paying attention to changes in the city.
When I visited Detroit, the hometown of my husband,
in 2007 for the first time, I was very much fascinated
by the buildings in that city.
Beautiful Art Deco buildings, and then I couldn't find
out why the city actually deteriorated that much.
Then I got so much interested in knowing the history of that city.
Mr. Vergara's photography resonated with these personal curiosities.
This summer, when the library received from Mr. Vergara a series
of World Trade Center photographs, I actually caught my breath
for a moment, recalling the time and the difficulties that I went
through in New York City in 2001 as a new immigrant to this country.
That became a trigger for me to host today's event.
This is the first event, lecture event which I coordinated
as a curator for architecture, design, and engineering.
Let me introduce Camilo a little bit.
>> Sorry, I'm having trouble--
[ Inaudible ]
[ Laughter ]
>> Mari Nakahara: I hope I don't have any connection trouble.
[laughs] Camilo Jose Vergara was born in Chile in 1949
and is a formally trained sociologist and writer as well
as one of the top documentary photographers working today.
His acclaimed books include Silent Cities:
The Evolution of the American Cemetery in 1989;
New American Ghetto in 1995; American Ruins in 1999;
Twin Towers Remembered, 2001; Unexpected Chicagoland published
in 2001; Subway Memories in 2004; How the Other Half Worships in 2005;
Harlem: The Unmarking, Unmaking -- I'm sorry -- of a Ghetto in 2013;
and Detroit Is No Dry Bones, published this year,
which is available for purchase after this lecture.
The website which you are seeing here, Invincible Cities,
has made his work better known
through a special map-based interface.
I played around a little bit.
I strongly suggest you do the same.
It's really interesting.
Chronological order.
The cities and the locations,
you can see how the city has been changing.
A MacArthur Fellow Genius Award
in 2002 recognized the exceptional stature of Vergara's work.
In 2013, Vergara became the first photographer
to receive the president National Humanities Medal.
In 2013, Vergara selected the Library of Congress, thanks to him,
to be the permanent home for his photographic archive.
Previous acquisition of Vergara's work were the series
of Silent Cities, which is documenting cemeteries
across the United States between 1976 and 1989.
And Twin Towers Remembered, which is recording that World Trade Center
in New York City between 1970 and in 2001.
As of today, approximately 8000 photographs have been transferred
to the library, and the full archive is expected to offer
about 10,000 images spanning the 1970's through the 2010's.
Before introducing Camilo,
please note that this event is being videotaped for the broadcast
on the library's website and the other media.
We encourage you in the audience to ask questions
and offer comments during the question and answer period.
But please realize that in participating in the Q&A period,
you'll be consenting to the library possibly producing
and transmitting your remarks.
Finally, please join me in welcoming Camilo Jose Vergara.
[ Applause ]
>> Camilo Vergara: Thank you very much, Mari.
Couple of things.
She made me five years younger, so that, very grateful for that.
[laughter]
>> Mari Nakahara: So you can just--
>> Camilo Vergara: Yes.
I'm also very happy to see Helena here,
and to see Floyd [assumed spelling], and certainly Mari
and Phil [assumed spelling] that's,
that are doing this wonderful work putting this exhibition together,
this collection together.
And every time I come here,
I find this place friendlier and friendlier.
I just, it just, it's amazing when you start doing photography all
over the country and start going to different places
to present your work, after you go back, and back, and back,
you just feel at home in the different places,
and it's just a wonderful feeling.
So I want to start with the section from Detroit here,
then show a few pictures of the World Trade Center series,
and somewhere along the line,
I will explain how the title came about that you will see.
So Detroit Is No Dry Bones.
My first encounter with the city of Detroit was stepping into a feeling
of unbelief, and it was unbelief because,
not that I hadn't seen skyscrapers before because I had been
to Chicago, and I had seen them there, and I had seen briefly
in New York, but I had never seen an abandoned skyscraper.
And I had never seen 12 abandoned skyscrapers.
[laughs] You know, that was, what's going on here?
And, you know, when I asked that question, I'd take a picture
because I'm kind of slow in figuring out things,
so I figure I'd take a picture, and then I'll take another picture,
and then slowly, you begin to maybe not figure out how all
of this came about, but just have some sense of direction
of what is happening between the time you first became acquainted
with it and then the time sort of you lived off, you know.
That you, you're through.
You end. I just, I would look at buildings.
This is the United Artists Building.
The first photograph was a photograph that was taken
from the hotel that was at the, at that time,
was a Salvation Army building called Harbor Light.
And it was taken in '91.
That's about 25 years ago.
Building doesn't exist anymore, but I sort of almost saw that I wanted
to do that, retake that picture year after year after year,
and then the building was knocked off.
And it was, before that was cinder block,
so I had to stop, like, at 2002 or '03.
And since then, this whole area has been revitalized and rebuilt.
The whole empty front, you know.
It's not, it's still empty, but in, within a couple of years,
all of that's going to, the picture is going
to be a completely different one.
Some of the abandoned buildings, even this one,
may be rehabilitated someday.
You would find odd things.
So I decided that one of my jobs was to sort of keep track
of things that get left out.
So like this man, who was the caretaker
of a 32-story skyscraper called the Broderick Building in Detroit,
and that building, you can see this, we're on the roof there.
And he told me at one time, you know, we were 15.
There were 15 people that maintained this building, and at this point,
must've been around '91, '92.
He was the only one, and he could, he was not all
that energetic, you know, at that time.
So, but every time I went to Detroit, I would find him,
and we would go to the roof, or we'd stop in different floors and look
around at this collection.
It was this large skyscraper that you can see in the first picture
that had been left behind.
People had just left, and there were lawyers' office, you know,
where all the archives were full with stories of divorces,
and dentists' office that had the state of the mouth of thousands
of people because there were many dentists' office.
And they had a collection of equipment, that was ten years old
or 20 years old, you know, that was rusting.
And I found that extremely interesting.
There was also city offices in some of these buildings
and even records, you know.
The parole office could be in a building,
and then you have all these parole records left behind.
There was a section of Detroit.
It was like the first wealthy section that was called Brush Park.
And it was so derelict.
This is in 1987, and I just thought there's nothing
that could happen here but this, it's just going to return to nature.
It was a house that was, a mansion that was built by a lumber baron.
Detroit was in a strategic place, so when the lumber came
from upper Wisconsin, you know, through the lake,
it would come to Detroit, and that's what got Detroit started
in developing a carriage industry.
First, there were wagons, you know, and then they, railroad,
into the railroads, and finally, into cars, so.
So here, we're going to see the evolution of this place.
This is '91, and you can see the weeds get even bigger.
You can also see, and here it's about 2000.
And that's today.
And I think the incredible thing is just not only shows the building
coming back, it shows how so much of the, what was built
around it has disappeared, is not there anymore.
And it shows a blonde woman here.
So you can fill in the rest.
I mean, they used to be first an area of rooming houses.
I mean, first an area of very wealthy people, then it,
they became rooming houses, and the wealthy people went
to other neighborhoods with larger houses.
Then it was a place for derelicts, and people who, homeless people,
and the few people that sort of hang onto it.
And then it's sort of coming back again as a kind of middle-class,
and in some cases, upper-class neighborhood.
Well, that one didn't have the same look.
This one, for those of you who've seen Beverly Hill Cops, number,
the cop number one that was shot in 1984.
This, you'll see this at the beginning of the picture.
Well, that's there no more.
New buildings were built there.
I have the picture.
I'm not showing it here now because they are, compared to this, I mean,
these were beautiful buildings that have been lost.
Again, if you get far from the downtown and you go, in this case,
to the East Side of Detroit, you see there is a church,
and then the churches would organize these sort of sales of used clothes.
And here it's all laid out, you know,
and you can imagine all the coats.
There's hundreds of coats and those two women selling it.
And I thought of going back and see what that looked like today.
I called the church too.
I wanted to know, I was very surprised to know,
find out that they actually didn't even remember the name
of the two women there.
You know, so that's what it looks like today.
This is another set of two pictures separated
by about the same number of years, over 20 years.
This is the first one.
Street, it's near Eastern Market for those of you who know Detroit.
It's in the East Side too.
And what you see here, one of my great interests,
it's what happens in between.
It's the efforts.
I mean, those places didn't just sit there and decay,
but there were efforts from the city to do things.
There were efforts from people who lived there to do things.
And I thought it was important to keep track of those things,
not just wait until the whole place was level.
And so a new population, new buildings,
new everything came about.
So here you can see that at one point,
the city may have put planters and new trees.
You see the planters there.
It was big supermarket here.
And this is basically what it looks like today,
but you still can see the planters, you know.
So you can do, like, a kind of an archaeology of places.
This is the Packard Plant, which is probably the largest
of the car plants there, which is, at one point during World War II,
they built airplane engines there.
They built Rolls-Royce engines for --
lots of discoveries were made there, advances.
One of them was soundproofing buildings because they had
to test these aircraft engines, which, you know, of course,
they would render you deaf in no time.
So they had, they did a lot of insulation also
because of the temperatures rose so much, they had special ways
to ventilate it and air condition it.
Again, it was, the core of the factory was built by Albert Kahn,
who was a great Detroit architect.
So here you have it in '91.
And at that time, the city even thought that buildings
like this could be recovered, reclaimed, made into something else.
So the idea here, we had one industry
that at one time employed 30,000, 35,000 people.
We could have 200, you know, small shops here,
and each one of them would employ 100.
And then we'll be in business.
It actually didn't happen that way, but it was sort
of interesting to see what would come.
And, you know, there would be a laundry [phonetic].
There would be a place that would have used shoes.
There'll be a place that had cardboard.
Another place where they took cars to take apart.
You know, stolen cars.
And then they, you can see the building sort of crumpled part
by part, and at this point -- and this is I think this year --
it was taken over by some Spanish entrepreneur that wants
to make it, bring it back.
So he puts the name there.
I don't know where he went, to Kinko's, and made this sign.
[laughs] So here is the Packard sign, which it's, it was fancy
and substantial at one point.
And then he put a picture here that has old Packard cars.
So that's the Packard plant.
There were other plants like that, and this is one of them.
It's a, it's made airplane -- I mean, not airplane --
car engines, automobile engines, and there is the name, Continental.
So they continue buildings like this
as the other building continued to have a life.
They have a life in the internet
because you have kids actually go there --
and I don't know why they do this -- they skateboard on the roof
and they do things that you think they're all going to get killed,
and they, you see those, and you too [phonetic].
Also, they go with drones, you know, so that they fly the drones,
and the drones show you all the crevices of the building,
which is sort of fascinating to watch.
I was just, I like what's happening
to the parking lot there, the way it's cracking.
And it looked like almost like the surface of the Moon.
There were buildings.
This is part of the ruins of Detroit, and what attracted me
to that -- it was a very, very exciting type of ruins to me,
and those were the ruins of the buildings that, in my childhood,
in some little town in Chile, you know,
I would look at pictures of them.
But they were like the buildings
that would be built in Mars, you know.
I thought that was the future.
That was, you know, and I believe in the future.
I thought the future was going to be wonderful and there'd be,
going to be buildings like this.
But I never thought that I was going to face them as ruins.
So this, buildings like this, and I think there's another one here.
Well, this is a little earlier.
But they were built, this was built before.
The one before was built right after the World War II
when architects spent some time without building too much
because it was, the war was there.
So they kept dreaming of, you know, this exciting, new city,
this new civilization that was going to be built after the war was over.
This, on the other hand, is an old diner --
one of many that were built, like, right around the time
of the Depression, right before the Depression.
There would, I think the company
that built them was based in Wisconsin.
I don't know what the name of it was, but they built
like 30 of them in Detroit.
I mean, Detroit was a boom town.
They needed cheap places to eat.
And then this is like I'm encountering this building, like,
in its last night almost, you know, because then I started going back,
and it's now abandoned, but you can see there it looks almost
like there is a congregation of ghosts
that are having coffee and burgers there.
Except that, they're invisible.
But the light means that there is still some life in the building.
Again, there are other buildings that get this new life
in different ways, you know.
It's that at one point, like with the building I showed you before,
you know, where Eddie Murphy paraded in front of it in 1984,
this made 8 Mile, the movie 8 Mile, and you can see Eminem pass by
and with some kind of a water gun, or something, or paint gun.
They just shoot at the steer.
So before they did the, they shot that scene,
the designers for the movie repainted the steer.
If you go near the Rouge Plant, which is on the West Side
of Detroit, you see scenes like this, which are,
to me, were extraordinary.
I just thought that [laughs] that'd be a house
where they wouldn't go trick-or-treating to.
[ Laughter ]
Then there was this development that I captured in Camden,
and Chicago, and other cities.
And that's, you know, you have a building that has two families,
and then one side is occupied and the other side is abandoned.
And both of them continue their life,
their movement into the future.
And I'm very interested in seeing what's going to happen.
So you can see the one that's occupied put his fence on, and,
you know, sort of protecting itself.
Except that the problem is that if somebody squats here
and builds a fire to stay warm in the winter,
the whole things can burn.
Here you see, oh, another example of one of those pairs.
It's not that the house that is occupied is in very good shape,
but it's certainly better than the other one.
And here it's like extreme case of someone that's holding
out between two abandoned houses and puts the American flag,
and it's certainly making an effort
to stay there and preserve the house.
I thought that those stories were important, that those stories need
to be told, and that also, they are stories
that are very easy to ignore or not to see.
Then I look at the landmarks of Detroit,
of which there are many, and very striking.
This is a conservatory where there is a great collection of orchids,
and it's in an island that's called Belle Isle,
which is a very beautiful place.
I, I'm not sure, but I think Albert Kahn designed that.
Maybe Floyd knows.
And this is the Fisher Mansion, and there are several Fisher Mansions.
Fisher was a very wealthy man, very wealthy family from Detroit
that did the carriages for the cars.
So they would do tens of millions of them.
So you can imagine what a big thing that was.
And they, you know, houses like this were built by them.
And this is the decoration of one of them.
It's in an area called Boston-Edison.
Then again, what the, what I realize this, in this Detroit, and I'll get,
later on, I'll get into gentrification and so on.
And the tremendous contrast between the people who were there,
and live there, and stay there, and their values, and so on --
I remember reading somewhere the only super,
Jesus is the only superstar.
And I thought, I mean, everywhere you go, there is Christianity.
There's a church.
There is something or other.
You look at the kids that are coming in, and they're, you know,
opening up bakeries, and bars, and restaurants, and shops, and so on.
And it's a very, very different thing.
You don't see any reference to this other life of Detroit
where Christianity is important.
As you can see, it gets too hot in the summer,
so you bring your church out [phonetic].
Plus, it's also a way to pick up, you offer people some food.
They sit. They listen to you.
Maybe they'll become members of the church.
Then this sort of thing, which builds, this sort of,
it's a very, very strange thing.
It sort of creates an aura of authenticity
around the city of Detroit.
So Detroit, it's seen by many people.
You know, this is the real thing.
This is the place because you see things like this.
I mean, you see the hand.
You see people do it by hand.
People put their things that are not mediated and not going to be found
in hundreds of other places.
Everything, you know, at least in this place is kind
of unique, one of its kind.
Oh, like that, you know.
So Christ, why not put him in the Upper Peninsula, you know?
Walking in Northern Michigan.
Or if you have an abandoned building, you know,
why don't you put stories from, you know,
the life of Christ or something?
And then there are these other quite sophisticated signs that you see.
And there is no place for them to go, so in some sense,
I felt that it was my job to go there and photograph, you know,
the ones that I saw, and put them up,
and make sure that people knew them.
Then this, there is this other difference here.
I mean, this need to construct a history,
to tell a history, you know.
We begin with the Egyptians, so here it's the Egyptians.
You know, and then here it comes Mandela,
and slavery gets put in the middle.
And it keeps moving to the right, and it ends up with Coleman Young,
which was a very influential mayor of Detroit.
And under his, he being the mayor, they built the Renaissance Center,
which is the building that you see here.
And also, the People Mover.
Now, in the sort of gentrifier version or their, you know,
the other version of Detroit, none of those two things would appear
because they are consider as huge boondoggles --
you know, things that fail, that just waste of money.
But for their black population, because they were doing,
they were built and put there at a time when there was a, the city,
there was black control of the city, and the city was sort of a center
of what you call Black America.
So that's a detail from that picture.
There is something really very powerful about this, you know.
Just you see all these faces here, and you see it fading out.
I mean, certainly didn't look like this when it was first painted.
Then the idea that you have,
this idea that you have to tell your history.
I mean, no gentrifier coming to Detroit says, look, you know, my,
here is my grandpa, you know.
He came from Italy and he brought, he used to cook pasta,
or he had, we have Garibaldi here.
Maybe the old immigrants do that.
They used to do that, of course,
because they had statures [inaudible].
But today, this urgency, this need is felt in graphics like this
where you see the Renaissance Center on top, you see the American flag,
"The Fist" of Joe Louis's fist here.
And then you see here, you see Malcolm X, King, and Coleman Young,
and the two black artists that in the, lifted their fists
in the Olympics in Mexico City.
So that is a statement.
And I would go to sort of out of the way place,
really out of the way place.
If you want to know where this is, you know, you just,
it'd be quite hard to find by chance.
But to me, there were statements that needed
to be preserved, as well as this.
I think this is wonderful.
It's on the cover of the book, on the back cover of the book.
This is a view of Mahalia Jackson.
And I doubt that you could get, you know, sort of a better portrait,
you know, not -- it's, of course, not there.
It disappeared a long time ago.
But I'm glad I have a picture of it.
Then there is all this kind of naïve signage paintings
that people put for purposes.
I mean, they give dance classes here in this place.
Here is a place that fixes cars, and they hired a homeless man.
It says, look, we got some paint here.
Why don't you do something?
He said he was an artist, so he did the history of transportation.
[laughter] You know, which for Detroit is just what you need.
And how do you leave in a city with, you know, you have a daycare center.
All of your kids are black.
Snow White happens to be Caucasian.
So how do you deal with that?
Well, you paint her brown, or you paint her green, or you paint her,
you know, it's always a color.
So you go there and you ask these questions, you know.
[inaudible] try to find out if this has anything to do with race.
And they tell you, no, it doesn't have anything to do with race.
It just, you know, kids like this
because it reminds him of chocolates.
[ Laughter ]
They are the inventions that people make to sort of cope with the fact
that there are over 3000 bus stops in Chicago
that have nowhere you can sit and wait for the bus, you know, so you,
in here, you may get rained over, but you still have a place
that you can sit on, that somebody came up with that.
And I thought that if I was writing something about inventions,
I would love to write a story of who thought this up, and went looking
for the tires, and found that, I mean, of course, then the city finds
out that there is this, and they feel ashamed of it,
and they dismantle it, so this thing only lived for a few weeks.
But to me, it's, it was, it's one
of the most important pictures in my Detroit series.
What's behind is an old police station.
Now, there are other immigrants that come to Detroit.
Some of them are immigrants.
Some of them are children of immigrants,
and they're Greeks and Albanians.
And their specialty, it's to buy some
of the failed Kentucky Fried Chickens, and McDonald's, and,
you know, all those big franchises that go,
try to make a go and can't do it.
So they built it, and then they put like a hat on top of it that's made
out of a material called Dryvit.
And you can make almost anything you want with it.
You can build the Parthenon if you want with Dryvit.
Won't last very long, and if a car hits it, you know,
you'll have it all coming down.
But Detroit has the most extraordinary examples
of this type of, if you want to call it architecture or design,
is all over the United States, but Detroit, it excels in doing it.
This is a, you can still see the lights
from the original White Castles.
You see those.
Then Detroit, because it got so, it began to get so much attention,
you know, and the eyes of the world were there,
and you could do something on the streets of Detroit,
and it was better than having something
in a gallery, in an art gallery.
So then this works in two ways.
First of all, these are students that did a thesis is building.
There were students at a place called Cranbrook Academy,
which is in very wealthy suburbs of Detroit, north of Detroit.
Bloomfield Hills, I think it's called.
And so they built this house for about $60,000.
A family lived there about six months,
and then it flopped and became abandoned.
And then, of course, the taggers come along.
So this is GASM, you know, tag.
All over Detroit is his tag.
And then, of course, there was another, there was a local artist
that would put dots in abandoned buildings,
and his name is [inaudible].
So [inaudible] put the dot there.
So a few years passed by.
Some development came out of the center,
and this is not far from the center.
And it's in, like, the largest,
one of the largest empty lots in Detroit.
So they figured that's what it's going to be rebuilt next.
So somebody started an Airbnb there and redecorated the house
by inviting a muralist from Brooklyn that has some name,
and I guess it's doing some castles and fantasy in that place.
This is recent.
It's like a year old.
You can see the size of the lot around it.
It's probably going to be all built very soon.
But in the meanwhile, you can have your honeymoon there if you want to.
[laughter] You, and you get that view there, and so,
I mean, if you're brave enough.
So this is another.
It's a homage to a graffiti artist from Houston, Texas called NEKST
who put his name all over the place.
He's all over Philadelphia.
He's in Houston and so on.
And he happened to die.
So there is a way in which this artist that they, at least him,
and you can see some of their, they are on the web.
They have little films about, you know, when they go out tagging.
And, you know, here he's opening a bottle of champagne.
Now, the problem was that he was using that menacing knife
to open the bottle of champagne, and what that, the result of that was
that a city inspector drove by and he says, "This is inciting crime."
So then the lady that owned the building hired somebody,
and that's what [laughter] it looks like today.
And, well, the building, the mural continues to be very popular,
but for the wrong reason.
People go and see what happened to the masterpiece, you know.
And here we come to, "Detroit is no dry bones."
So what happens, the condition of Detroit becomes famous all over,
so there are four designers from Holland that come
to Detroit with a great idea.
What if we convince ministers, pastors to change the word,
put the word "Detroit" wherever they put the word "God"?
So, of course, the project didn't do very well
because the pastor didn't want anything to do with such an idea.
But they went to this church, and the minister was having a sermon
that day, and it was about God is no dry bones.
So then, well, you know, that was their chance to put "Detroit."
So they put "Detroit."
So four white women from, well, of course, from Holland did
that very neat writing and very neat sign right there.
And it kind of, to me, it brought together, you know,
sort of black culture, a city that is falling apart and decaying
in many parts while at the same time is resurging, and the, and this,
you know, this attention that it's getting and the fact
that people would come as far away as Rotterdam or some city like that
to do a sign the way you see it.
Again, of course, Detroit got Banksy and they --
I'm getting close to the end?
Oh, there's probably two or three.
Okay. We'll have a problem with the Trade Center, then.
How much of that one?
Okay.
>> Fifteen.
>> Camilo Vergara: Okay.
Okay, so the story here is it's, this is another one
of those wonderful buildings that were built after World War II
and designed after World War II, and they were like,
this is what the future is going to be like.
So it's there, and it's, you know, the sign is, it's still standing.
And then what happened is that Banksy happened in Detroit.
So he goes and he find this to be a wonderful place
to do a piece of his work.
So he puts it there, and within a couple days,
the whole wall has disappeared.
So now there's a big hole in there.
I mean, I want to give you a sense of there are things that I generated
from the inside, like all those religious images that I showed you
at the beginning or the idea of history.
And then there is another type of religious images, and that,
those are generated by people from a church in Indiana
or people in a church in Illinois.
They say, we need to do some good in the world,
so why not go into Detroit and do something?
So they see abandoned buildings and then they want to beautify them,
to make them more attractive.
So this is like a church from Indiana or Illinois that comes
to Detroit and, you know, one of the leaders is an artist.
And then they get some of the local kids to collaborate.
And they paint these abandoned buildings, and, you know,
one of them is religious.
The other one is ice cream.
But there are, you know, these are the product
of a very different culture and they are the product
of this tremendous attention in Detroit.
Then there are volunteers that come, you know.
They say volunteers that work for Starbucks, or work for Ford Motor,
or work for Google, or some other place.
They say, we want, they give them a day to go
to Detroit or two days, you know.
So they get, and then they try to create a little park.
And then there are the gentrifiers that do try to recreate something
that it's, like, has a flavor of what Old Detroit was,
but as a friend of mine says -- he grew up in Detroit --
there was nothing like this in Old Detroit.
Building that was a factory, then it was an art gallery,
and now it's a bakery, which is, which combines writing by hand,
seats that are taken from abandoned schools in Detroit,
little architecture details that were found,
and then attracts a group of people
that is a very mixed group of people.
And, of course, there's a couple taking a selfie there.
[laughs] You know, here you have an old white bread [phonetic] building,
and there's a casino that was built using
that building rather than demolishing it.
And this is an image of the Old Detroit, of the Detroit
of prosperity, of the Detroit of money,
of the Detroit that, of the '20's, you know.
You see they're putting the money into the vaults there.
And the Detroit that was white too.
So here it's the designer is a designer
that did a lot of work in Detroit.
His name was Corrado Parducci.
So black artists from the area react and they say, this is,
that stuff is not ours, you know.
Here is ours.
Rosa Parks lived here, so Rosa Parks replaces some of the other,
or it's placed there, you know, as being the right image,
the right portrait to put there.
And that's Motown.
It's the, you can help yourself to some postcards I have here
of the same postcard, and, yeah, right, that entrance, which had,
you know, it's quite a small museum but well attended and very popular.
Then there is a local folk artist that has her view of Detroit
where the local funeral home becomes as big
as the General Motors World Headquarters,
the old one that's right there in the back.
So it's, like, similar to what we saw with Snow White is that,
you know, you can't, you have to play around with the symbols
to just arrange them in a different way.
Detroit was, and it, it's a very spread-out city.
It's 139 square miles.
It's, it reached at one point almost two million people,
and now it has a little under 700,000.
So there is a lot of land,
and people cultivate that and grow crops.
So it's this man, it's a picture from '87.
And this is my last picture for Detroit.
I don't know if we have time to go into the Trade Center.
>> Very quickly.
>> Camilo Vergara: What?
Very quickly?
Okay.
>> Very quickly.
>> Camilo Vergara: So this is like the symbol, a symbol of Detroit.
A very important train station.
Brought the president of the United States for the inauguration.
I believe it was 1913.
And many people went to, you know, service the war and so on,
you know, from that train station.
Got hundreds of trains every day.
It's been abandoned for a while, so, any case.
So the Twin Towers, it's a simple thing.
It's just, I first became interested, you know,
because I was up on the projects.
I would photographs from the projects.
I wanted to get an air view.
I didn't have money for a helicopter or anything like that.
So I would go to the public housing projects and photograph from there.
So here you can see New York from about 1994 I think.
And this is 2001.
So what you see in 2001, there is no World Trade Center.
And that's like, you know, a few months ago.
But what this showed, it showed big areas in the foreground,
so you could see how the whole city was changing.
At the beginning, I was just attracted to that because, you know,
it was, tallest building in my town was three stories high,
and I wanted to know what one that, say, 112 stories would be like.
I also had, like, an attitude, you know,
so you've, you are in your 20s.
You feel, you know, you are being left out.
Nobody cares about, and so you figure, well, you too, you know.
You may be building the tallest building in the world,
but there it's a homeless person sleeping right in front of it.
So all of this at the old piers in Jersey, and they have disappeared.
This is the beginning when it was built.
And this is like the New York of the French connection
that doesn't exist anymore, which you can,
it was in a state of disintegration.
So much of it, you know, that part of it, part of the impulse
to photograph it was that, you know, it wasn't going to be there anymore.
And the irony here didn't scathe me that this was Liberty Drive,
and then when the building went up,
the new building was called the Freedom Tower.
So I took the pictures that every tourist would take.
So this is from the Manhattan Bridge, and from that very angle,
like, if you go there today, they'd say, chain-link fence.
But there is a hole where you can put your camera
and you can take this picture.
The only difference is that I kept taking the picture every year.
So this is 79.
That's the day of September 11th.
And that's, like, a few months later.
This is, like, 2005/2006.
And that's 2010, you know.
And then you begin to see other buildings going up.
And you begin to see a very different skyline.
There is the new what they call them One World Trade Center.
That's at night.
And that's like the way it is today, more or less.
And that's going to continue changing.
I mean, it's basically, it's a very, very different skyline
from what we saw many years ago.
And I'll go quickly through the other series.
This I like very much because it shows the church, the chapels,
St. Paul's Chapel that is from the 1750's, more or less.
And it's kind of there, and it stays put, and everything
around it kind of disappears.
You know, here is the Trade Center goes, and new, you know,
some new building goes there.
And then the new One World Trade Center is starting to go up.
And there it's completed.
So this is my presentation.
I thank you very much.
[ Applause ]
>> Mari Nakahara: Thank you very much, Camilo.
We would like to take a couple questions if you have any.
We have five minutes.
Reese [phonetic].
>> [inaudible] apartment buildings?
Because what happens if it's a high-rise
or garden apartment building and one of the tenants abandons it?
Then the whole building disintegrates?
You kind of showed duplexes,
but I wonder if it's a big building, how can you do it?
>> Camilo Vergara: Well, there are several pictures
of some big apartment buildings from Detroit.
There were some quite beautiful buildings
and some very large apartment buildings.
And it's sort of a slow process, you know, the disintegration
of an apartment building.
It's not, it doesn't happen overnight.
I mean, sometimes a big fire is, you know, it just takes care of it.
I mean, if the roof goes, there you are, you know.
So it's, but I do, I follow many apartment buildings.
Yeah. So go ahead.
>> Yes. I'm from Detroit, although I left there in '72,
but I still go back to visit my mother there.
She'll be 91 next month.
>> Camilo Vergara: Yeah.
>> [inaudible] But the old Packard Building, I worked there the summer
of '65 as a college student.
The defense department was there.
I worked with the defense department, and I remember going
from one building to another building,
and going through the abandoned parts
of the car company, and how scary it was.
You would go through there, and you'd see chassis
and engines just laying around, and I would always be looking
for the rats to come out.
But it's completely gone now, like you said.
Someone has said they're going to investigate and rebuild it.
But I don't know if that's really going to happen.
>> Camilo Vergara: Yeah, no.
There were raves at one time.
You know, they had music inside.
The sort of interesting thing is that one thing from Detroit
and from the rest of the country from the very poor areas is
that what survives and thrives is the music that's created there.
The visuals, not, you know.
It's like, what's inside the storefront churches that disappears,
but, you know, we all know the Supremes, and Motown,
and techno music, and so on.
Go ahead.
>> When you started taking photos in Detroit, did you know you were going
to keep coming back and documenting, or did that happen later?
Like, when did you decide these would become series?
>> Camilo Vergara: Well, you know, it's partly I think, you know,
with reference to the ending, is just that the first picture
that I take just tries to be a complete picture
of whatever's in front of me.
And then, you know, the picture is like a question, you know.
What's going to happen to this place?
So, you know, I feel like I have to go, you know.
So, I mean, you kind of arrange your finances and you figure, you know,
who is going to put me up?
Is somebody going to lend me a car?
Who is going to, you know, what I'm going
to eat, and that sort of thing.
And then you figure you have enough money, so you go back.
And, you know, that's kind of my way, and I'm very, see,
I haven't been able to do Cleveland because, basically,
there was no base that I could stay in Cleveland.
There was no place.
I would have loved to have done Cleveland or, you know,
some of the cities of the South.
But that's the idea.
I mean, and I think I've had very good luck with American historians
and people interested in American culture,
and architecture, and so on.
I've had lousy luck with people who do art photography and want to show,
you know, great, their, you know, moment [phonetic],
and the National Gallery, and all those places, you know.
I've had a couple of places --
the Getty or some other places have had a few pictures.
So it's like a fragmented.
It's a divided approach to photography that if you wanted
to make it as a photographer, you know,
all the stuff I'm telling you is completely irrelevant.
Why do you want to put for your photograph in the first place?
Why you want to give us the year?
Why do you want to tell us something about the evolution
and the history of the place?
Just show us a great picture, you know, that, an amazing picture.
>> Mari Nakahara: Okay, well, thank you very much.
>> Camilo Vergara: Okay.
>> Mari Nakahara: And at the end, that you may want to see more
of Camilo's pictures, and if you can actually show it, we have a Prints
and Photographs Division online catalog, and especially for the WTC,
we have a kind of sequence
for the same [inaudible] upload a little bit, quickly.
So if you go to the LOC.gov/pictures and then do the search,
and then you can see all of these World Trade Center series
by location.
So please play around and you will see more
and more pictures of the Camilo.
[laughs] Great, cheers.
And thank you for coming to this lecture,
and books are available outside of this building and in the hallway.
Camilo is ready to sign on the book for you.
So thank you again, and thank you.
>> Camilo Vergara: Thank you.
>> Mari Nakahara: Thank you.
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at LOC.gov.
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