Rhetoric of Ruins: Camilo José Vergara, Walter Benjamin, and the Politics of Urban Photography
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Citing Walter Benjamin as an influence, photojournalist Camilo José Vergara follows his predecessor’s lead by documenting the deterioration of urban and industrial spaces, composing a rhetoric of ruins meant to challenge capitalism’s ideology of inexorable progress. Vergara’s photographs accentuate the obsolescence of once fashionable venues in ways similar to Benjamin’s study of the Paris arcades, laying particular stress on the wasted commodities that surround and fill such venues. While he theorises a form of visual literacy that recognises the inscription of class distinctions in the built environment, he laments the persistence of neoliberal faith in steady public advancement. Even as Vergara’s image archive defies such faith, however, he takes pleasure in ruination as an aesthetic event. So deeply does he admire his focal buildings that he hopes to mark off a section of downtown Detroit as an ‘American Acropolis.’ For all Vergara’s sensitivity to interconnections between class and place, he at times interprets ruins as the general culmination of humanity’s aspirations, thereby eliciting universalist implications from structures that stand, in his more critical moments, for division and inequality. When he revels in architectural decomposition as a kind of teleology, he threatens to undermine his long-running argument that the visible corruption of social space should motivate collective efforts to redistribute wealth.