‘They Saw a Great Future Here’

“First, I have to show you something very important,” says Camilo Jose Vergara, gesturing with a vague sweep of his arm toward one of a half-dozen cars marooned in an otherwise empty, weed-strewn Santa Monica parking lot. “About my work.” He starts walking fast, toward a . . . well . . . once-white ’96 Pontiac Grand Am whose wheel-beds and rims sit caked with dry mud. “A rental,” Vergara says, as if showing off a priceless relic. With a giddy smile, he runs his long fingers over dozens of scratches and dents. White paint trails along the side mirrors’ casings. “Those are from driving through alleys,” he explains. “Sometimes it’s hard to really tell how narrow they are. I try to judge . . . ,” he breaks off, then pats the roof of the car, which is crisscrossed with muddy footprints. “I stand here on the top of the car. Sometimes in Los Angeles, it’s the only way to get the best perspective.”

For six months, Vergara has traveled 5,000 miles, spent 800 hours, much of it in alleys and on top of his car, and shot 230 rolls, all to expand our perspective of Los Angeles. A photographer-turned-sociologist-turned-photographer again, Vergara, 52, has been documenting what he calls the “architecture of poverty” since the mid-’70s, trekking into some of the country’s poorest neighborhoods to record their physical transformations. “Because I chronicle economic inequality, people call me a social photographer, a sociographer,” he says. The Chilean-born Vergara twists his mouth around the designations. “I call myself a documentary photographer, but that’s not quite right either.” Like a nature photographer who captures the evolution of a flower from bud to bloom, Vergara returns year after year to the same street corners and observes how a vacant lot, a doorway, a building change over the years. These are time-lapse photographs of despair, freezing in time what escapes faulty memory and the limitations of the naked eye.

A good portion of Vergara’s visual ruminations are found in his recent book, “The New American Ghetto” (Rutgers University Press). Taken by themselves, there is little technically jaw-dropping about his images. No sleight-of-hand shadows. No intense close-up caressing textures. These flat-lit, seemingly haphazardly framed photos appear to be a beginner’s first tries or a veteran’s cast-asides. You can just imagine the photo instructor’s tirade--”Record shots! Drugstore snapshots!”

“They’re dumb pictures,” Vergara says, throwing up his hands, a giggle emerging from somewhere within the tumbleweed of a beard. “People ask all the time why am I moved by pictures that are so ordinary, banal?”

Banality is precisely the point. In showing us, for instance, the changes of a single door in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn over 13 years, he tells the story of a community poisoned by fear and crime. In the first photograph, taken in 1981, the double door is intact, surrounded by groomed vegetation. In the next shot, from 1989, the entrance has been boarded-up, cinder-blocked and vandalized; the bushes and trees have disappeared. In the last exposure, from 1994, the entryway has been secured by an iron curtain, which, in turn, has been tagged. The absence of humans infuses this triptych of desolation with an eerie silence. Only ghosts live here.

Amid the sampling in his book, L.A. makes only a brief appearance. Most of the photos piece together the saga of such cities as New York, Newark, Detroit and Chicago. But Vergara, who has visited Los Angeles off and on during the last two decades, has been deeply interested in what sets this city apart from other immigrant destination points. When the Getty invited him last year to be a visiting scholar at its Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, Vergara finally got his chance to spend an extended period of time here. In addition to Vergara, the program this school year has invited more than 15 academics, writers, architects and artists to devote themselves to Los Angeles. According to Michael S. Roth, who heads the scholars and seminars programs at the institute, the Getty saw in Vergara someone who could capture “a city in convalescence,” who could make beautiful and political images out of its “irresistible decay.”

At its research center in Santa Monica, the Getty has culled a selection of Vergara’s early L.A. photographs in an exhibition called “They saw a great future here,” which closes May 2. Drawn mostly from his trips in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, the photos depict the infinitesimal shifts in a neighborhood--the skin that heals over the scars of white flight, black flight, vanished industry and shuttered business--and ultimately the future that lies in wait.

Arranged like a storyboard, the photos have the momentum of a narrative. The separate images are like scrapbook snapshots blown big: Busy playgrounds enclosed in chain-link. Brightly hued, hand-painted store signage. The wilting remains of a bungalow court. The varying visages of Christ depicted on murals. Backyards crowded with rusting mobile homes--ersatz duplexes. Office buildings without windows. Stores without walls.

But collectively Vergara sees them as the beginning of conversations, one that progresses frame to frame and another that prompts inquiry. “The first picture is more like a question mark,” he says, pointing to the abandoned bungalow court. “What would L.A. look like if it became a big ruin?”--or nodding toward the Messiah mural--”Why is Christ there?

“Fine-art photography is not quite like this. This is too head-on. There are no fancy angles. I have it in your face. It’s not just a single picture. It’s how it continues in time. One shot doesn’t tell a story. It’s how the material reveals itself. All I do is supply some lines of investigation. Change is what tells the story. Time is the architect.”

*

Vergara drops his tattered black camera bag, which contains a Nikon N-90 and 15 rolls of Kodachrome 64, onto the back seat of the Grand Am and brushes away papers and street maps from the passenger seat. We pull into traffic, and with each sharp turn or stop, ballpoint pens roll around the carpet. Narrow spiral notebooks are jammed in an accessory shelf. A cassette tape from a recent public radio interview he had given juts out of the deck. With his index finger, he pops it in and begins murmuring over it as if it were a particularly nostalgic song.

The grace of a Sunday morning means we float down the freeway. The I-10 east. Downtown towers arranged like expensive chess pieces. “In New York you get all the tall buildings. But because L.A. is mostly flat, you see a lot more here. It’s harder to hide things. The walls are thinner. Things are more visible. In that sense, L.A. reveals more.”

On Vermont Avenue, Vergara decelerates, tipping the car southward beyond Adams, Jefferson, Exposition boulevards en route east to Central Avenue. A city he first became acquainted with as a collection of sociological statistics, quadrants, census tracts, homicide and assault grids is again starting to piece itself together visually. “There are things I’m drawn to,” Vergara says, taking his eyes off the road for disconcertingly long stretches, “centers of social disorganization, places that are disconnected, dislocated.”

At a stoplight, Vergara wags his fingers toward some chain-link fences festooned with cardboard work-for-hire signs. Plumbers, bathtub re-glazers, hair-braiders, a car service offering to ferry family and loved ones to and from Sunday prison visits vie for attention in a 3-D version of the Sunday classifieds. Each turn, as we move south and then east, provides more images of improvised lives: three sundresses, a pair of trousers and some pantyhose hanging from a tree limb constitute a clothing store; a front yard jammed with mattresses has become a showroom.

“It’s a transitory thing--community,” Vergara says. “In that sense, there’s hope for the future. The immigrant spirit brings generations of warriors. A stream of people keeps coming in. Immigrants have a sense of where to go. They’re not going to go to Camden, N.J., or to Gary, Ind. L.A. is so close to Latin America. The weather is similar to home. But above all, L.A. is a city of work. That’s the sense you get: ‘Anything that gets money in our pockets.’ And L.A. lets you in, allows you to function on the street. They are inventing lives and, at the same time, they are inventing the city,” he pauses, the silence an underscore. “But where are these invented jobs going to lead to? It puts you in a very precarious situation.”

Vergara knows intimately the tenuous life. His grandfather was a prosperous fruit farmer in Chile, and Vergara grew up surrounded by expensive cars, elegant furniture, expansive houses. What the lifestyle didn’t provide was a safety net. “During my childhood,” Vergara writes in his book’s introduction, “I saw this varied and seemingly endless wealth vanish, leaving me with an enduring feeling that things cannot last, and filling my mind with ghosts. . . . Since then . . . where wealth and elegance prevail, I feel out of place, nervous, and I long to leave.”

In 1965, at 21, Vergara left Chile to study at the University of Notre Dame. While earning his B.A. in sociology, he casually picked up a camera and began to wander the poor neighborhoods of South Bend, Ind. He then moved to New York, where he continues to live, to attend graduate school at Columbia University. Sociology was his passion, but photography had become his obsession. “Close, sustained encounters with poverty,” he writes, “have shaped my character and driven me, perhaps obsessively, to the ghettos. I have never forgotten the places of squalor I once seemed destined to inhabit . . . though I live in stable middle-class neighborhoods . . . I feel this comfortable existence is transitory, that my real home is in some form of ghetto.”

A young African American man standing on an island bus stop on Vermont eyes the car as Vergara slowly slinks around the block three, four times--drive-by fashion--before deciding to stop. His eyes narrow as Vergara steps outside. The moment of silence that follows is as taut as a band set to snap.

“Excuse me,” Vergara, booms, smiling hard, all teeth. Most of his face--and his intentions--are hidden by his beard and large-frame glasses. He continues, in his waltzing English, “But do you know where the swap meet used to be? Was it on this corner? Or that corner?”

The man appraises him without words. Vergara continues, persistent, his manner polite, his posture dignified.

The young man turns fully around to face him, his expression annoyed, the cadence of his words as sharp as his stare. “Why do you want to know?”

Vergara hands him the slide of a burned-out husk of business slumped along a sidewalk. “I did this,” he eagerly explains to the young man.

“You did this?” his tone now alarmed, indignant.

“No, no, no. I took this picture.”

The man holds the transparency up to the sky, then turns his gaze back to Vergara, his expression shifting from annoyance to the quizzical. With each of Vergara’s repetitions, his face opens, as does his memory, as he tells the history of the block--what burned down, what was torn down, what was allowed just to deteriorate. He fills in the blanks--where empty lots now stand.

The man at the bus stop and his relationship to the changing landscape, Vergara says, is as important to the work as relocating the precise spot from where he once photographed. “There’s a lot of mistrust in the first encounter,” Vergara says, getting back into the car. “Distrust. Anger, ‘Who is this outsider?’ is the wary thought that escapes even the most stock-still face. You knock on doors and hope they don’t come out with a shotgun. Here they are friendly, but sometimes they think you are an inspector.”

He slides the car into gear, then into reverse, then back again. A couple of inches this way and that. Staring at the slide through his loupe, and then at the lot across the street, Vergara finally reframes the image--the precise angle and distance he was at when he photographed here in 1992. Climbing onto the roof of the car, the metal burping like a Coke can, he starts shooting.

“The only way you can tell it’s the same spot is the phone poles,” he says, squeezing off another, then another, a delighted glint in his eye. Storekeepers venture out to gaze, cars slow in traffic. “It becomes exciting. It’s like a little detective work. Something like a puzzle you start to put together. Sometimes you fail. Sometimes you just can’t answer. But that’s the business you’re in. To tell what happened.”

It is not difficult to see why someone wielding a 35mm camera, standing on the roof of a car peering over backyard fences, slicing off images, asking lots of questions, might prompt curiosity if not uncut hostility. Vergara’s had his share of street dramas--ranging from a Chicago car chase to an L.A. woman in a moving car opening her door in an attempt to hit him. To those images Vergara could supply this caption: “‘What right does this guy have coming in here, shooting us in this condition?”

Vergara is the first to admit that when he photographs Los Angeles he must contend with his status as both newcomer and outsider. As a new arrival who often photographs neighborhoods that are in flux, he has to negotiate the same shaky racial paths that those living in those neighborhoods do. But as an outsider, he is also the perfect ombudsman, barging in bewildered with fresh eyes. Through close observation he can best show how cultures intersect while providing the integral footnote of memory.

“Whenever I see a pawn shop,” Vergara says, “I think about how my mother used to frequent them. I don’t know how much stuff was lost. And now, in my personal life, I have less and less. When you come to America, you see a country that has thrown away entire cities--Boyle Heights, parts of South-Central, and you want to be the eyes, ears, voices to the people there,” he says, pausing as he angles the car toward the 105 Freeway, ascending the ramp, the sea iridescent--from this distance, a winking illusion.

“Those left behind feel that they’ve been wronged by the system. The stories are very difficult to tell. This is kind of an incredible undertaking. Everything conspires to make it impossible. There’s no commercial value. Where would you peddle these kinds of images? You have to be able to hold out for so long. Five, 10 years pass by. If I were taking these pictures in Switzerland,” he says, letting out a part laugh, part wheeze, “I would be going nowhere.”