Main entry:

Vergara, Camilo J.

Title & Author:

Detroit is no dry bones : the eternal city of the industrial age / Camilo José Vergara.

Publication:

Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, [2016]

Description:

v, 295 pages : color illustrations ; 23 x 28 cm

Notes:
Camilo Vergara's Detroit / by Robert Fishman -- Game changers -- American acropolis: the end of an idea -- Urban fabric -- Traces fo past grandeur -- Neighborhood landmarks -- This is no Rome: ruins and desolate cityscapes -- New life for former banks -- To reach the lost: churches where everybody is somebody -- Spirits of motor city: folk signs and murals -- In Detroit, Jesus is the only star -- Business-oriented signs -- Celebrating black heroes and heroines -- "It has nothing to do with race": Snow White, Snow Green, Snow Brown -- "Gone but not forgotten": memorials -- "You all came here and just marked up our entire city" -- Brightmoor: the search for a Bucolic uptopia by the Rouge River -- African American artists: history, remembrance, turf -- Persistent blight, concentrated: an abbreviated street guide -- Inner-city billboards -- Extinguished neon signs -- Street vendors -- Doing business behind plexiglass -- Oases admist desolation: Detroit's new architecture -- "Farm city": replacing blight with beauty -- Detroiters -- "In the ghettohood": things get better slowly -- Conclusion -- Detroit's evolvoing ruins -- Giving back to the community -- No dry bones.

Summary:

"Detroit has lost nearly sixty percent of its population since the mid-1950s. Ethnographer and photographer Camilo José Vergara has traveled to Detroit to document not only the city's precipitous decline but also how its residents have survived. Through annual visits to Detroit over the past twenty five years, Vergara has sought to capture the image of the inner city and its changes over time. From the 1970s through the 1990s, these changes were almost all for the worse, as the built fabric of the city was erased through neglect and abandonment. But over the last decade Detroit has seen the beginnings of a positive transformation, and Detroit Is No Dry Bones provides unique documentation of the revival and its urbanistic possibilities. Beyond the fate of the city's buildings themselves, Vergara has consistently sought to illumine the lives of Detroit's people. Not only has he shown the impact of depopulation, disinvestment, and abandonment on their lives during the worst years of the urban crisis; but he has shown their resilience as well. The photographs are organized in part around the way people have re-used and re-purposed structures from the past. Vergara, for example, is unique in his documentation of local churches that have re-occupied old bank buildings and other impressive structures from the past and turned them into something unexpectedly powerful architecturally as well as spiritually"-- Provided by publisher.

ISBN:

9780472130115 (hardcover ; alkaline paper)
0472130110 (hardcover ; alkaline paper)

Subject:

Vergara, Camilo José 1944-
Detroit Mich.
Inner cities Michigan Detroit Pictorial works.
Historic buildings Michigan Detroit Pictorial works.
Buildings Remodeling for other use Michigan Detroit Pictorial works.
Urban renewal Michigan Detroit Pictorial works.
Social change Michigan Detroit Pictorial works.
Constructions Reconversion Michigan Detroit Ouvrages illustrés.
Rénovation urbaine Michigan Detroit Ouvrages illustrés.
PHOTOGRAPHY Subjects & Themes Architectural & Industrial.
Buildings
Buildings Remodeling for other use
Historic buildings
Inner cities
Social change
Social conditions
Urban renewal
Architekturfotografie
Streetphotography
Dokumentarfotografie
Detroit (Mich.) Social conditions Pictorial works.
Detroit (Mich.) Buildings, structures, etc. Pictorial works.
Detroit (Mich.) Biography Pictorial works.
Michigan Detroit

Form/genre:

Biography
illustrated books.
Illustrated works
Biographies
Ouvrages illustrés.

Holdings:

Location: Library main 322969
Call No.: 322969
Copy: 1
Status: Available