Customer Reviews

American Ruins

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Camilo Vergara's latest effort will appeal to those interested in both architectural and landscape photography, as well as urban activists, artists, writers, and even musicians. Vergara has the ability to draw on a variety of inspirations in his thoughtful analyses of forgotten urban America. Nominally about decaying buildings in Detroit, Newark, Chicago, and elsewhere; American Ruins goes deeper--exploring connections between buildings, art, sociology, psychology, and the natural environment.

The book is divided into sections based on ruins typology. This is a good approach, as it allows Vergara to show connections between cities and their related phenomena which might not otherwise have been apparent. His accounts of conversations with wary local residents and (usually) thoughtless politicians and developers invest the book with a jarring realism that juxtaposes effectively with the often dreamy and strangely beautiful photographs.

Another excellent attribute of this substantial book is its readability. In comparison with The New American Ghetto (Vergara's previous book), here Vergara separates his narrative into shorter separate, site-specific analyses, which makes it easy to ingest a few pages at a time and return for more later. It also makes it easy to move through the book in a non-linear fashion, based on your own visual interests.

This evocative work will be required reading for architects, preservationists, and artists. However, the sublime beauty of Vergara's photography should win him fans from many other persuasions. Perhaps in the end Vergara will succeed in his effort to, at least, bring appreciation for not just our sanitized and restored "landmarks," but for our most humble and neglected buildings--those which tell the story of this tumultous century in ways only this book reveals.

I was intrigued when I first saw this book on Amazon, and was pleased to later receive it as a gift. But I was immediately disappointed when I discovered that the images are all infrared photos. The result is certainly not informative, nor would I consider it art. Rather, they are overstylized, self-consciously "arty," and frankly hacky-tacky. Why, when one has subjects as dramatic as these, not present them as is? Why deny the reader/viewer the chance to see these buildings and places as they really look? I recommend instead any of Camilo Jose Vergara's books. His images of American ruins are probably more journalism than art, but they at least let the fascinating ruins speak for themselves.

After viewing the glowing segment on The CBS Morning Show, I had to see this book. AMERICAN RUINS truly deserves the accolades, awards and attention it's receiving. Arthur Drooker's exquisite photographs transport you and his descriptive prose is as elegant and moving as his haunting images. So, thank you, Mr. Drooker for this treasure about our national treasures... and for making my holiday shopping so easy!

This is a fascinating book of documentary photography. The author is entranced by abandoned structures. His viewpoint of these tragic, yet often eerily beautiful buildings is made clear by a quotation he provides from a play by Fernando Pessoa, i.e. he fantasizes about the life that went on in them when they were alive. These are pictures from a graveyard, and we, as readers, are attending a memorial service, with Mr.Vergara providing a well-written eulogy.

When first leafing through the book I immediately thought of Jacob Riis, the turn of the century photographer who photographed the New York slums. This thought also occurred to someone providing a review on the dust jacket of the book. I ended up revoking this comparison, however. Mr. Vergara's task here is not to provide social commentary. For the most part he simply loves these buildings. I feel that he would not even care to see many of them restored, but envisions leaving them in a state of arrested decay, like the large ghost town of Bodie in California. Recently, in a series of articles on corporate welfare, Time magazine remarked on the fact that wealthy corporations often easily abandoned obsolete sites, showing no concern over the blight they caused in the community. So here we see derelicts owned by RCA, a company that could afford to tear them down or restore them for community use. My point is that this book may raise many thoughts regarding American community problems, but Mr. Vergara is not here to deal with these issues. And that is really OK, too, as the book is wonderful just as sort of an archaeological document.

My one disappointment is that the book covers only a few cities: New York, Detroit, Chicago, Gary, Camden, and the South Bronx. For a sequel I would suggest that Mr. Vergara tour more cities to find some of the other classics that exist. He could photograph the Winecoff hotel, site of the country's most disastrous hotel fire that killed 119 people in 1946. This 16-story structure still stands abandoned in downtown Atlanta. Or he could document the huge Kelso depot that stands empty in the middle of the Mojave Desert. I am certainly looking forward to that book.

Like the other reviewer, I first saw this on a CBS Sunday Morning News segment. The pictures were fantastic, and I immediately ordered two copies, one for myself the other as a Christmas gift to a fellow photographer.
There are several masterpieces or near masterpieces of photgraphic images here, but there's a good bit of filler, too. I suspect that seeing an exhibition of original prints would be absolutely dazzleing. (There are 25 places photographed.)
I have grown accustomed to the superb reproduction of recent photography books, as examplified by APERTURE, and unfortunately the printing falls considerably short of those standards. I am also surprised by how soft the images are (taken with a hand-held 35mm Digital Infrared camera) compared with those usually seen in Large Format fine-art photography.
On the other hand, the Amazon price is under $30, not the $75+ that most high quality photo books are going for these days. I'd say that it's well worth the price.

Vergara is certainly not like your typical civic booster who is touting the gentrification of former slums and the real estate boom that has overrun most US cities in the past two decades. Vergara doesn't directly argue that yuppies and Gen X-ers are good for today's cities. From reading this book, I am assuming that he doesn't like them too much. He likes grimy, but stable, industrial America that earlier generations knew.

However, Vergara is not an urban planner or a civic leader (although I'd like to see him try his hand at each). Vergara's skill is chronicling through pictures the wholesale abandonment of America's great cities. In his introduction, the author realizes that in many cities with a shrunken tax base, it is simply too expensive to rehabilitate architecturally-significant structures, so landlords (usually with the city's blessing), just demolish or abandon the property. For each renovated brownstone downtown, I'm sure that the author can document a dozen abandoned rowhouses or factories on the "wrong side" of the town.

Call me insensitive, but I was most acutely drawn to Vergara's treatment of abandoned or near-abandoned buildings that were once important to America: the Firemen's Insurance Building in downtown Newark and the Michigan Central RR terminal in Detroit (rather than his examination of the residents of the ghetto as was evidenced in "The New American Ghetto"). The photo of the modern people mover in Detroit gliding by boarded-up buildings says a lot about urban mismanagement and is hauntingly fully of despair. If the "can do" spirit of modern American technology can't save Detroit, what can?

What I found quite unique was that Vergara proposes leaving these buildings to rot, like was done in Rome and Greece. Visitors taken through these ruins would be told that an empty shell of a building once housed an insurance company, a vaudeville theater, or some wealthy merchant and his family. However, as a public employee who has to deal with these structures for a living, there are some health and safety issues that I feel the author seems to forget (abandoned buildings tend to attract junkies, rats and disease and worse, fall down on people after a while). Maybe he is strictly speaking as an artist, but his ideas are very intriguing.

Vergara is a great photographer who thrives in urban areas. I've worked and/or visited many cities in this book, and what I like best about "American Ruins" is how he documents the death of the building over a five or ten-year period, mentioning what the building held in its heyday.

"American Ruins" is a great antidote to those who indiscriminately work to "improve" cities, either through gentrification or through ugly aesthetic improvements to historical buildings (brickface comes to mind). It's a depressing book, but it stirs the mind and challenges the soul.

As I mentioned, this book is a natural progression from his earlier book, "The New American Ghetto," and "American Ruins" complements his work as a photographer and social critic. I've loved all of his stuff eagerly await more books by this guy every time they are released.

If you liked this book, you would also like "A Town Without Steel: Envisioning Homestead," by Judith Schachter Modell & Charlee Brodsky; "Homestead: The Glory and Tragedy of an American Steel Town," by William Serrin; and "The Destruction of Penn Station," by Peter & Barbara Moore. They all chronicle how this nation has abandoned its industrial cities for a less connected, less public, less community-minded, less responsible, less reliable and more uncertain future.

Vergara's photographic essay takes the unusual approach of studying abandoned buildings in Detroit, Gary, Harlem, South Bronx, Newark, and Philadelphia/Camden. Detroit is the most interesting of all, where there are so many abandoned skyscrapers that Vergara suggests they be converted into a sort of museum-of-urban-ruins. He has a point, since Detroit has many buildings that are too expensive to rehabilitate and too expensive to tear down. Understandably, this is not how Detroit's community leaders envision gaining fame for their downtown.

If one were to find fault, it would be that too many buildings are covered in too shallow a manner. Some of these abandoned Detroit buildings are fascinating, and it's a shame Vergara gives so little detail about them. Many pages are devoted to trivial, minor buildings, and there are photos showing such things as rotting dog carcasses in the street, which are interesting in their own right but not directly relevant to the title.

This book was perhaps the most fascinating picture book I have ever seen. If you are a lover of nostalgia, and the concept of old buildings and factories sitting idle in a modern world, then this book is for you. There are loads and loads of pictures depicting weathered buildings, theaters, automobile factories, abandoned cars, houses, townhomes, and businesses. The subjects are mostly within the 20th century, and others are not much older, so it keeps things in a specific era, and shows you how the past is never erased; there are always traces of yesterday that will remain. A+A+A+A+A+

I was very disappointed in this book. I have collected many photography books on ruins since the 1970s. This is one I would not have bought if I had been aware of the use of infrared imaging. The infrared imaging makes the foliage in most photos stand out so much that it distracts from the structures being portrayed. Drooker is a good photographer as far as composition and fine black and white images. The only sections that were really beautiful, to me, were the Bethlehem Steel works, where there was little or no foliage in glaring white to distract from the objects. The buyer should be aware of his use of infrared in the description of the book. I was unaware of it because the book was "recommended" to me on my email and I did not look at the entire description. It was suggested by Amazon since I have often bought photography books and books on ruins. The description on the book's site is actually misleading - it certainly is NOT the first book to cover American ruins. I have many others in my bookshelves.

Was able to learn some information didn't know before. Sadly some of these places don't exist anymore just because the upkeep was to expensive.
Able to read it in just one evening. Stunning photographs on every other page.