The Skyscraper Museum is devoted to the study of high-rise building, past, present, and future. The Museum explores tall buildings as objects of design, products of technology, sites of construction, investments in real estate, and places of work and residence. This site will look better in a browser that supports web standards, but it is accessible to any browser or Internet device.

Tuesday, December 6, 2016 6:30-8:00 pm

Camilo Vergara Book Talk

Detroit Is No Dry Bones

University of Michigan Press, 2016

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, the city has seen the beginnings of a positive transformation. Vergara's photographs, collected in Detroit Is No Dry Bones, provide unique documentation of revival. Beyond the fate of the city’s buildings, Vergara captures the distinct culture of this largely African-American city and documents re-purposed structures, including local churches that have re-occupied old bank buildings and other institutions of the past that carry unexpectedly powerful architectural and spiritual force.

Camilo Jose Vergara was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 2002 and received a Berlin Prize Fellowship in 2010. In 2013, he became the first photographer to be awarded the National Humanities Medal. He is author of numerous books, including ​​Silent Cities: The Evolution of the American Cemetery; The New American Ghetto; ​​and ​​Harlem: The Unmaking of a Ghetto.​​

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The exhibitions and programs of The Skyscraper Museum are supported by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency.