Camilo José Vergara was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 2002, served as a Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers fellow at the New York Public Library from 2007–2008, and received a Berlin Prize Fellowship in 2010. In 2013, he became the first photographer to be awarded the National Humanities Medal. For more than four decades he has devoted himself to photographing and systematically documenting the poorest and most segregated communities in urban America. His focus is on established East Coast cities such as New York, Newark, and Camden; rust-belt cities of the Midwest like Detroit and Chicago; and West Coast cities such as Los Angeles and Richmond, California. Approximately 1,200 of Vergara’s photographs are available online at the Library of Congress. (Author photograph by Lanz) 

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