Camilo José Vergara (born 1944) is a Chilean-born, New York-based writer, photographer and documentarian. He was born in Santiago, Chile. Vergara began as New York street photographer in the early '70s. This work changed significantly in the middle 1970s, when graduate work in sociology at Columbia University increasingly sensitized him to the complexities of environmental influences on social behavior.
Beginning with his project "The New American Ghetto", Vergara has been compared to Jacob Riis for his photographic documentation of American slums and decaying urban environments. Beginning in the 1980s, Vergara applied the technique of rephotography to a series of American cities, photographing the same buildings and neighborhoods from the exact vantage point at regular intervals over many years to capture changes over time. Trained as a sociologist with a specialty in urbanism, Vergara turned to his systematic documentation at a moment of extraordinary urban stress, and he chose locales where that stress seemed highest: the housing projects of Chicago; the South Bronx of New York City; Camden, New Jersey; and Detroit, Michigan, among others.
Vergara's work was the subject of a 1999 exhibit at the National Building Museum, "El Nuevo Mundo: The Landscape of Latino Los Angeles." The exhibit was shown later in 1999 at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution. "The New American Ghetto", an earlier exhibition, opened at the National Building Museum and was later shown at The Municipal Arts Society in New York City. After the publication of his second major work, American Ruins, Vergara's reputation was fully established; he won a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" in 2002 and served as a fellow at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities (MARCH) at Rutgers University in 2003/2004.
His work has been published in seven books. His Harlem: The Unmaking of a Ghetto, scheduled for release in the Fall of 2013 by the University of Chicago Press, uses photographs made over decades in that iconic Manhattan community, and the visual. social and cultural effects of gentrification on what was historically among the richest repositories of African-American culture in the urbanized North.
In 2010, Vergara was rewarded a Berlin Prize fellowship and spent the academic spring semester 2010 at the University. On July 10, 2013, Vergara received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama in a ceremony at the White House.