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I landed in America in 1965 from Chile. I literally arrived on a banana boat. I went to the University of Notre Dame in the midwest and then to Columbia in New York. I had a teacher – also a photographer – who taught foreign students to write and speak better English. I would try to write poetry, which he thought was terrible. I’d never taken a picture before but he encouraged me to try photography and offered to lend me the money for a Pentax Spotmatic he’d seen for sale downtown. After that, I would just walk around New York with it and take photos. It quickly became clear to me how divided the city was. Half was white and the other half was Black and Latino. There was tremendous segregation.
Columbia was very prosperous. The students were well off and many were the sons of extremely rich people. I felt out of place. Also, there’s just a huge sense of loss when you leave your country and you don’t know anybody and are on your own. It made me want to look at what else was going on: to see the other side and the underside of the city. I found it easily because, in the late 60s and early 70s, deindustrialisation was going on. Big companies and car plants were shutting down and there were huge job losses and store closures. That contrast resonated with me. My family had lost a lot of money. The first part of my life was about seeing things disappear and having to make do with less and less. I was interested to see that in the US.
Walking around New York at the time could be dangerous. There was a lot of desperation, but the risks were part of the excitement. It made you look more carefully around you because anything could happen. There were people high on heroin on the street and looking for money to get a fix. Sometimes they would come at you but even though they were maybe younger and stronger than I was, they were in such bad shape that it was like the whole thing was going on in slow-motion. Even if they came at me with a two by four, I could escape.
One day in 1970, I was walking around the Bronx and came across these kids and their dogs. I like the contrast: the impersonality of the setting but a very strong sense of personality in each person and how they were dressed, their pride in that. I always look at the urban landscape – I never think of people as being separated from where I find them. And that’s what this picture has: the group standing before the looming towers of the housing projects on this huge vacant lot – which later became a juvenile prison. Then there’s a subway line in the back. It was a very exciting shot.
Huge parts of the city were being destroyed. This was my attempt to answer the question: “How do I preserve this whole damn thing?” There was a lot of good work from that period focusing on very specific things in New York, like the graffiti-painted subways, people playing in the streets, and so on. But my idea was to capture its whole urban reality. That’s what I tried to do, as big and as large as I could, from the skyline to the little details. Because these places were disappearing and it didn’t look as if they were going to come back. And they didn’t.
Camilo José Vergara’s New York 1970s series is published by Café Royal Books.
Camilo José Vergara’s CV
Born: Santiago, Chile, 1944.
High point: “Being honoured with a National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama in 2012 and being named a MacArthur Fellow in 2002.”
Top tip: “Be empathic and inquisitive. Hang in there, persevere, the sailing is rough.”
