Announcement: Photographer Camilo Jos Vergara to Speak Wednesday, February 25

Camilo Jos Vergara will deliver a lecture on February 25, 2009
at 6 PM in the Alumni Reading Room of the Pratt Library in Brooklyn. He
will speak about his photographic documentation of buildings in Harlem
as they have changed from 1977 to 2009--the effort is part of his
current project: A Visual Encyclopedia of the American Ghetto.

Since 1977 Camilo Jos Vergara has documented the transformation of urban
landscapes across the United States. Trained as a sociologist, he
reaches into the disciplines of architecture, photography, urban
planning, history, and anthropology for tools to present the gradual
erosion of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
architectural grandeur in urban neighborhoods, their subsequent neglect
and abandonment, and scattered efforts at rehabilitation. Repeatedly
photographing, sometimes over the course of decades, the same structures
and neighborhoods, Vergara records both large-scale and subtle changes
in the visual landscape of cities and inner cities in the United States.

Vergara's books include Silent Cities: The Evolution of the American
Cemetery (with Kenneth Jackson, 1989), The New American Ghetto (1995),
American Ruins (1999), Unexpected Chicagoland (with Timothy Samuelson,
2001), Twin Towers Remembered (2001), Subway Memories (2004), and How
the Other Half Worships (2005). He has received numerous awards, among
them a MacArthur Foundation fellowship in 2002.

Vergara's talk is sponsored by the Program in Critical and Visual
Studies at Pratt Institute and is free and open to the public.

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