Photographer recorded Camden's decline

Abandoned gas stations from the 1920s, bicentennial murals depicting slaves beating their masters and buildings so dilapidated they look as though they are rotting can all be found just 15 minutes east of Penn's campus. Right across the Delaware River from Philadelphia, Camden, N.J., has been a subject of photographer Camilo Vergara's studies on urban decay since 1979. Vergara recounted his experiences photographing Camden at the Urban Studies Program's 21st annual lecture in Logan Hall last Thursday. Vergara's stirring photographs and stories of Camden's architectural and cultural erosion enthralled about 100 attendees. He described the plight of a man -- Vergara referred to him as the "urban Robinson Crusoe" -- who lived next to an abandoned building that area residents used as a dump until the structure brimmed with rats. "I realize that there are many elements and parts of these cities that will never be recorded because there is no Smithsonian of the ghetto," Vergara said. Some faintly gasped as Vergara's photographs appeared on the projection screen. Among them were shots of a woman dead on the floor of her tiny room, a tree growing in the rubble of a collapsing library and a huge prison constructed across the street from Walt Whitman's former house. Born in Chile, Vergara earned his bachelor's degree in sociology from Notre Dame in 1968 and a master's in sociology from Columbia University. He started taking pictures during the later years of his undergraduate career, doing some work as a photographer for Notre Dame's student newspaper, The Observer. Vergara described a frightening moment in Camden when he was photographing trees along a street and a woman mistakenly thought he was going to cut them down. He said the woman's young children accosted him, one of them gesturing as though he was concealing a handgun. "You can feel the hostility growing," he said. "It's a risk." Mark Stern, co-director of the Urban Studies Program, said the program's annual lecture provides an opportunity for the sometimes disjointed Urban Studies faculty and students to congregate together. "Our virtual community can come together and be a real community," Stern said. College senior Fatimah Muhammad said Vergara's work offered a seldom-seen perspective on urban life. "His project was really ambitious," she said. "He's trying to show the story of a city from the corners, the neighborhoods. "The images will stay in my mind for a very long time," Muhammad said. "They were powerful ... a lot of them were powerful ... and I'm going to talk about it for a while."

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