A Smithsonian of decline

Camilo Jose Vergara is drawn to photographing the rough vitality of the disintegrating post-industrial cities of America, he tells Aidan Dunne

Camilo Jose Vergara has spent most of the past 30 years or so photographing the kind of places almost everyone else ignores or avoids. American Ruins at the Gallery of Photography marshals a small proportion of his work documenting the worn, disintegrating fabric of America's post-industrial cities. Unlike celebrity photographers, though, Vergara doesn't just breeze in, take his pictures, and move on to the next assignment. He works with the methodology of a scientist - and is in fact a sociologist - returning year after year to record the cumulative changes in an area on a small and a large scale. So while many of his images are individually memorable, their true strength lies in the changes they document.

Vergara, a calm, patient man with an easy manner and a nice line in understated humour, was in Ireland recently to take part in an international conference on Photography and the City at UCD. In 2002 he was awarded a MacArthur "genius" fellowship, and you can see why. Over the years he has built up an extraordinary visual archive of urban history, a "Smithsonian of Decline" as he has termed it, capable of yielding information on myriad levels. His expanding portfolio of New American Ghettos includes sections of New York including the South Bronx and Harlem, Newark and Camden in New Jersey, Gary, Indiana, Chicago, Illinois, and several areas of Los Angeles County.

Yet in a way what he does falls between two stools, satisfying neither artistic nor sociological communities. "Sociologists had a problem when I started taking photographs," he recalls. "They don't trust images and never take them as evidence. Perhaps they associate them with imagination, not with reality. Maybe because they can be faked."

On the other hand, although photography currently enjoys a pre-eminent position in the art world, the US art world is a bit sniffy about Vergara's work, perhaps because it is functional as well as aesthetically pleasing, too many steps removed from Kant's philosophical recipe for art as evidencing "purposiveness without purpose". His exhibitions and lectures tend to be in libraries and historical museums. "Architects, planners, historians usually make up the audience."

It may also be that it is just too accessible to satisfy the sense of exclusivity that is part of the art world. You don't have to penetrate a layer of critical theory to appreciate it. Pretty much anyone can see immediately what it's about, and visitors turning up at the Gallery of Photography quickly become engrossed in the sets and sequences of images. When we talked at the gallery, American visitors approached him several times to say how much they liked the work.

"It must be strange," he mused afterwards, "for someone to come to Ireland on holiday and find themselves looking at photographs of places in America they'd never dream of going to when they are at home."

VERGARA WAS brought up on a farm in Rengo, an agricultural town in Chile's central valley. He has written that he was drawn to ruined neighbourhoods in the US because they reminded him of this early home, a place of crumbling walls that he quickly came to think of as being backward. When he set out to revisit it, in 1990, he could find "not even a trace of it". Growing up in Rengo, he conceived a longing for prosperity and modernity. When eventually he was studying electrical engineering in Indiana as a means of attaining both, he found himself easily distracted by the grittier aspects of urban America.

He was instinctively drawn to the rough vitality of marginal and depressed areas, to dereliction and decay, to the melancholy beauty of abandoned and crumbling buildings. Yet part of the appeal of all this for him is that ruins are charged with stubborn, residual traces of life and humanity. "A lot of these places . . ." he says, reflectively, looking at a photograph of spray-painted graffiti, " . . . you have to remember, much of the vitality of the US comes from them, from the ghetto."

Early on, he began to distrust the notion that ghettoes were an aberration, a temporary glitch in an overriding process of improvement and modernisation. "It became clear to me that ghettoes and ruins are permanent in that you will always have them, they are part of the system."

Crucial to this is the element of time. Processes that are imperceptible from day to day become glaringly clear from year to year. But once you adjust to that time scale, one of the things that surprises in his work is the speed of destruction. An apparently healthy streetscape can descend into dereliction, a huge, functional apartment block can be reduced to a burnt-out shell, all within a few years. A perfectly intact suburban house seems to implode dramatically from image to image. You appreciate how residents can be left in a state of shock as their seemingly stable world disintegrates around them.

He points to two photographs of a corner site on Broadway, Camden. In the first, the corner building is an electrical goods store with a bold General Electrics sign; in the second, a few years on, the same building is a Dominoes pizza store. "General Electrics paid for half the cost of those signs. It meant they believed this was a place where people would spend money. It's indicative of prosperity."

Then things fell apart. The little retail area is now "a cluster of people-repair places, like drug treatment centres. All the things that people want to keep at arm's length end up bunched up in one place. So people go to the drug treatment centre or whatever, and then they go eat a pizza."

His photographs of Fern Street in North Camden record the patchwork deterioration of a once-prosperous street. As Hargrove Demolition keep extracting buildings like teeth from a mouth, you realise the viability of the street is crumbling. Drug users colonise vacant buildings, rubbish makes the pathways impassible. One magical image records trees growing in the atrium of Camden Public Library. A minor leak in the atrium, he explains, initially ignored, led to the ruination of the entire building.

He couldn't get access recently, he said, because the stairway had disintegrated. "Maybe next time I'll get the fire department to lend me a ladder. But then there'd probably be a big controversy about the misuse of public resources."

It is emotionally charged material, which makes it all the more important that Vergara approaches it with a dispassionate gaze. When he started out, he was wary of falling into the standard techniques of art photography. That wasn't what he wanted to do.

"You know, a photographer might visit one of these areas, and they try to convey it in terms of formula, so they get the atmospheric picture of addicts shooting up, of the caring grandmother, and so on. You know what the pictures are going to be. Rather than trying to make those kind of statements, I wanted the passing of time to do the talking for me. I established certain rules."

He focuses on buildings rather than people. And: "I shoot so that you can see what you're looking at. Head on, no deep shadows, no cropping - though I have used cropping since, to make things clearer. Nothing in isolation, always in context. Always work from the same viewpoint, if possible from a height."

As it happens, there is a degree of convergence between his eschewal of the standard photographic narrative devices and the approach championed by Bernd and Hilla Becher in Germany. They too distrusted photography's habitual ways of telling predictable stories. Over decades, they built an archive, a typology of industrial buildings and structures, with a deliberately objective, documentary approach. Their students, including Andreas Gursky and Candida Hofer (currently showing at IMMA), are some of the best known contemporary art photographers.

Vergara observes that no-one seems to have followed his lead in the US. "I don't have any students, or followers. Photography went in a different direction, it turned its back on this stuff," he says, nodding his head toward his own images. He has worried about the fate of his archive, but the internet may be one way of securing it. The Ford Foundation has backed a current multimedia project, Invincible Cities, hosted by Rutgers University and based on his Camden work. You can view it at www.invinciblecities.com. It's worth seeing.

American Ruins is at the Gallery of Photography, Meeting House Square, Temple Bar until July 30 01-6714654 Camilo Jose Vergara's book, with the same title, published by The Monacelli Press, NY, is available at the gallery, price €59