The Street

What do vacant lots signify? How should we interpret architectural relics overgrown with weeds? What social processes do street art memorials embody? The Street drills down into the intimate street photography of Camilo J. Vergara to outline a visual dictionary for urban inequality. City streets reveal much about the inequality that carves up American life and opportunity, and urban corridors harbor evidence that society has sorted people, communities, and resources unequally. 
 
In this collection, a leading cast of scholars from a variety of disciplines creatively interpret Vergara's photos of Camden, New Jersey. Field guides give readers the tools to identify phenomena quickly and accurately; this guide visualizes the elements, policies, and social exchanges that characterize and contest inequality in the United States. Drawing on Camden as a case study, each essay decodes the visuals that require scrutiny to understand the unequal landscapes of American cities and makes clear that the stereotyped analyses of urban residents and neighborhoods are insufficient. Where Camden has been popularly construed as a failed urbanity-and that failure is attached to the residents who live there-the writers in this volume illuminate the public and private policies that are responsible, offering a corrective to predictable analyses of poor cities.
 
Tackling topics such as race and law enforcement, gentrification, food environments, childcare and schooling, urban aesthetics, credit markets, and health care, the contributors look for markers of inequality and challenge conventional thinking about what we should see when we observe troubled landscapes. A timely book that will be of interest to fans, citizens, students, and scholars of urban life, The Street is an innovative guidebook to the most urgent challenges facing American cities today.

Naa Oyo A. Kwate is an associate professor at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. She is an interdisciplinary social scientist with wide ranging interests in racial inequality and African American urban life, and has studied topics including fast food, retail, and the direct and indirect health effects of racism. 

Darnell Moore is the Director of Inclusion Strategy for Content & Marketing at Netflix. He is the co-managing editor at The Feminist Wire and the writer-in-residence at the Center on African American Religion, Sexual Politics and Social Justice at Columbia University. Named one of The Root 100's most influential African Americans, Moore has been published in various media outlets including MSNBC, Huffington Post, EBONY, and others. His first book, No Ashes in the Fire, won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Memoir/Biography in 2019.

Camilo Vergara is one of the nation's foremost urban documentarians, Vergara is a recipient of the 2012 National Humanities Medal (awarded by President Barack Obama) and was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2002. Drawn to America's inner cities, Vergara began recording New York City's urban landscape in 1970, the year he settled there. Since 1977, he has systematically photographed some of the country's most impoverished neighborhoods, repeatedly returning to locations in New York, Newark, Camden, Detroit, Gary, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Vergara lectures widely and is the author of numerous books and essays. His photographs have been the focus of nearly a dozen exhibitions and have been acquired by institutions nationwide. The Library of Congress will be the permanent home of his photographic archive. Born in Santiago, Chile, Vergara earned degrees in sociology from the University of Notre Dame (B.A., 1968) and Columbia University (M.A., 1977).