Search results for ""Author Camilo Jose Vergara""

Domestically and abroad, America is known as the richest country in the world. It is hard not to be impressed by the standard of living in the nation’s most affluent suburban and urban neighborhoods. Yet, scattered amid stretches that abound in wealth, the country is home to neighborhoods rife with violence, poverty, segregation, and decay. Within these blighted urban landscapes, however, there is at least one notable example of plenty: churches. They do not always appear as traditional houses of worship, but often emerge from the retrofitted shells of former storefronts, garages, factories, warehouses, domestic dwellings, and public institutions. Regardless of the façade, churches populate America’s poorest neighborhoods.Bringing together more than 300 richly textured color photographs and a series of candid interviews with pastors, church officials, and congregation members, this extraordinary book explores the conditions, beliefs, and practices that shape the churches and the lives of the nation’s urban poor. Over a period of thirty years, sociologist and photographer Camilo José Vergara repeatedly visited these places of worship and the eclectic mix of buildings that house them. In twenty-one cities located in ten states across the country, photographic sequences coupled with insightful narrative show how ordinary structures assume, modify, and shed a religious character, how traditional churches—if they fail to adapt to new congregations—are demolished, and how new churches are designed and built from the ground up.Vergara pays special attention to the objects, texts, and imagery that religious leaders make use of to create environments that inspire devotion. Pastors of developing congregations often arrive as crusaders, with missions that cannot be served by traditional religious iconography, and with budgets that force them to use inexpensive materials. In some cases, pastors bring objects of worship from their home towns in places such as Mexico, Puerto Rico, Africa, and the West Indies. Despite the idiosyncratic features and folk decoration that distinguish ghetto churches from one another, however, Vergara shows that, for the most part, they are driven by similar religious agendas. They tend to preach about resilience, avoid involving themselves in national and international events, and consider their truths to be absolute and eternal.A powerful, poignant, and visually arresting portrait, How the Other Half Worships stands as a stark witness to how churches are being rebuilt in the dilapidated streets of America’s cities and how religion is being reinvented by the nation’s poor.

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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.

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