Pictures From the Front
While he found the market to be “very lively,” he noticed someone was staring at him. “I saw the eyes of a black man looking at me from a corner, and I felt this tremendous hostility, as if he was saying, ‘You don’t belong here.’ I thought, this man doesn’t know me–why is he looking at me like this? It’s hard to figure out, when you’ve just arrived, why all this intense emotion is directed toward you. But it’s a thing that bothers you, that stays with you–that look is something I’ve never been able to forget. I’d lived in Chile for 21 years and I’d never seen it. There are plenty of poor people there, but they just didn’t look at me with that same resentment and rancor.”
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In 1970 Vergara and his wife moved to Mount Vernon, just north of New York City. He took a job at a Manhattan ad agency and saw the South Bronx every day outside his train window. “The decline was happening so fast; the Bronx was in the news all the time. It attracted me like a magnet. I went again and again to photograph. My plan was to get off at different subway stations and walk around, so that I would see different things. There was a feel of fresh destruction–you could smell the fires. You would see buildings that had been occupied only two or three days before, but now people were going in and out to retrieve things. Dogs lingered around the buildings, looking out, after the people left. The Bronx was so densely built-up that when it started going you had these huge empty lots with big piles of rubble. Then the rubble would be removed; then the lots were empty; then trucks would come in the middle of the night and dump trash there, so the city built berms around the empty lots so you couldn’t drive trucks in.
“My whole methodology of photographing was formulated in the Bronx. In 1977 I started photographing buildings in a straightforward manner with the idea of going back to the same places again and again. As a result, the lighting I used changed, the lenses I used changed, my whole attitude toward photography changed. If I were to place a person right in front of a building, I would be using it only as background, and then the story of the buildings wouldn’t come through. To tell that story you need to use special lenses, perspective-correcting or architecture lenses, so that the sides of the buildings wouldn’t be distorted. You had to get the buildings fully lit so you could count how many apartments were occupied and how many were abandoned. You see, I’m collecting evidence. I was looking to tell a story. You become a slave to a territory; you have to keep going back. You look for flat light that hits the whole building–you don’t want ‘interesting’ shadows. But this approach also insured that I had no future as a photographer for the next 20 years, because the first photograph would have little interest in itself.”
These early trips to Chicago were awkward for Vergara because they were ostensibly trips to visit his in-laws. He felt he’d become “sort of an embarrassment to my family.” He didn’t have a steady job and survived with the help of occasional grants. “What was I doing? It’s all right to have a hobby when you have a job. How do you understand a hobby that’s taking up most of your time, that’s become an obsession? This is what I wanted to do full-time, but it was not producing any income. I’m not ashamed to say that there’s been a lot of mooching. The cars that I drove in Chicago were often my in-laws’ cars, and they would grumble because I would often bring them back with dents in the roofs from standing on them. Then in 1981 I had a show that was reviewed in Time magazine, and so whenever my sister-in-law would see me going somewhere to photograph she decided to say, ‘You are going to work.’
He’s fascinated by colorful murals on the sides of ghetto buildings. “My conviction as I go through the neighborhoods is that there are many artists with great talent, but whose work stays there and goes unnoticed.” One photo shows a mural on the side of an empty building at 47th and Drexel with figures behind elegant curtains in upper-story windows, as if the building were occupied again. Vergara has also seen “private art, that people do in their in own rooms, that becomes visible when the building is abandoned. You can go into someone’s bedroom and find a mural or a self-portrait on the wall in pencil or paint or spray paint. In Chicago there was a very striking mural of scenes from African-American history that became exposed when the building next to it was demolished. I got to know the maker of one mural that’s on the side of a fish store. Here’s a place that’s selling porgies and smelts and clams and this guy painted a whale. He said, ‘The whale is the king of the fishes.’ I had to admire his ambition. Now the plaster has fallen off, and there’s a billboard behind it.” The billboard says “Some things change, some things remain the same. NAACP.”
