Detroit Is No Dry Bones: The Eternal City of the Industrial Age

By Camilo Jose Vergara

Over the past 25 years, award-winning ethnographer and photographer
Camilo José Vergara has traveled annually to Detroit to document not
only the city's precipitous decline but also how its residents have
survived. From the 1970s through the 1990s, changes in Detroit were
almost all for the worse, as the 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 the photography in 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's camera has consistently sought to capture the distinct culture
of this largely African American city. The photographs in this book,
for example, are organized in part around the way people have re-used
and re-purposed structures from the past. Vergara 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.

Code: 37646

Member price: $49.50