Baby, it's icy outside!

This winter morning, my neighborhood looked like an outdoor skating rink. I slid with every step even though I was wearing my Sorels. It was miserable. Likewise, I look at the ice cascading out of the windows in this Vergara photo, and I feel the cold. Taken in the Henry Horner Homes in Chicago in 1995, this photo speaks to the dead cold of winter as it turns to spring. The ground around the building is mostly ice-free. The ice coming out of this abandoned building's windows is the coldest of the cold. There's movement, but not the kind you can see, at least not before the ice crashes to the ground in its final resignation. I hope my Bronx neighborhood sees this moment soon.

It's been a couple of posts since I've mentioned Vergara, but whenever I research urban exploration photography that I admire, it often begins with me Googling his name. This is how I found the above photograph, from a short Slate blog post from January 15, 2010: "American Ruins: Nature is taking back these buildings." Truth is that a small Vergara slideshow of this sort is nice - in spite of the now often-seen images of the Packard Plant and former Michigan Central Railroad Station -- but I really hope that somebody is shooting for an extensive book of nature taking back buildings. I could look at those photos all day. Would that still be ruin porn or would it be something else? Hmmm...

My Google search also turned up another 2010 Vergara media reference, this one from December 27th in a Times blog post titled "What was your worst travel experience of the year?" Urban explorers often have fantastic stories about unexpected things that happen while they're out in the field, so to speak. But the ruins are an urban explorer's destination. Vergara's awful travel experience is quite pedestrian. Here's an excerpt:

Realizing we were really stuck the driver let us off in a place I could not identify because of the snow, the wind and the cold.
As I got off my feet sank almost up to my knees and the wind blew snow on my face. I could not read the street signs.
I learnt how difficult it is to carry a suitcase and a heavy bag full of Christmas presents when there is a foot of fresh snow on the ground.
Suitcases don't roll on snow.
Hands freeze when uncovered.
On my hair snow turned to ice.
And I didn't know where I was going.

Stay warm, everybody, unless you want to be cold!

Photo caption: Henry Horner Homes, 2051 W. Lake St., Chicago, 1995. Photo by Camilo Jose Vergara.

a link for Martin Luther King Day

For today's Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, NPR did a piece about Camilo Jose Vergara's documentation of King murals in urban America. The interview and the slide show is available here. I've copied and pasted the text that Vergara wrote about this project, which is also available at the NPR website.

Photographing a Ubiquitous Subject

by Camilo Jose Vergara

NPR.org, January 19, 2008 · In the following essay for NPR.org, Camilo Jose Vergara writes about the images of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. that he has photographed and how they are beginning to disappear in some places.

In America's poorest neighborhoods, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is perhaps the most popular subject of public art, along with the streets, hospitals, schools and housing projects bearing his name. Collectively these have become one of the defining elements of the American ghetto. I believe that they help us understand how people living in poor, segregated urban communities — those about whom Dr. King was most concerned — perceive him and his legacy. They show how inner-city residents use his portrait to feel proud, to sell merchandise, and to develop a sense of security, identity and belonging.

Since 1977, I have been documenting images of Dr. King that regularly appear along the commercial streets and alleys of such cities as New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, Camden, N.J., and Baltimore. Many of the murals portraying this civil rights leader are painted on the outside walls of liquor stores, auto-repair shops, fast food restaurants, mom and pop stores, and public housing projects. The majority are the work of sign painters and amateur artists. All of the statues and many of the murals I photographed are located on streets named after him.

Over time I became interested in learning why these images are so pervasive. I feel that they reflect a significant cultural phenomenon: the rise of Dr. King as a central moral figure in poor neighborhoods, and his elevation to secular sainthood as the savior of dispossessed African Americans. His varied representations, often based on photographs taken from the national media, express poor people's perceptions.

After the South Los Angeles riots of 1992, many Latino shopkeepers had Dr. King's portrait painted on the facades of their stores in the hope of staving off the African-American rioters from robbing or vandalizing their businesses.

Wherever they are located, his portraits are usually respected, thus escaping damage and defacement. Sometimes, however, practical considerations result in electric cords emerging from his face, or a closed-circuit TV camera being attached to his ear, or security gates installed over his portrait.

But few of the sign painters hired for portraits of Dr. King have been particularly adept at getting good likenesses, with the result that he often comes out looking Mexican or even Mexican Indian. And now that Latinos in South Los Angeles have become the majority, new images of Dr. King rarely appear while the old portraits of him have been replaced by religious images and specifically Latino subjects.

The phrase "I have a dream" is often written above or below portraits of King. The dream is about justice, equality, three meals a day, housing, education, jobs and peace in the neighborhood. The many images of him in the inner city are powerful reminders to residents to keep pursuing those goals.

Camilo Jose Vergara has been documenting urban America for more than three decades. His work is included in the Berman Collection at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and in 2002 he won a Macarthur Genius Grant for his photography. He is the author of several books, including How the Other Half Worships.


Mott Haven section of the South Bronx, 1977. Photo by Camilo Jose Vergara.

Passenger series. Chicago, Illinois; July 7, 2007; 3:02:10 p.m.