One Changing Harlem Storefront, 1977-2009

65 East 125th Street, Harlem, 2001 (Carmilo José Vergara)

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The New York Historical Society has some noteworthy photo exhibits coming up in the next month. We'll have a full preview coming up prior to their openings, but after taking a peek at Camilo José Vergara's "Harlem 1970-2009" exhibit, this sequence seemed worth sharing now. The street photographer and MacArthur Foundation genius award winner visited this one spot repeatedly, documenting the ongoing transformation in the neighborhood. Only eight photographs, taken between 1977 and 2007 outside of 65 East 125th Street, are included in the exhibit, but there are 24 on his website, where you can see what starts off as a local nightclub transform into a vacant storefront.

Vergara says of his work: “This urban documentation project breaks with the ways historians, planners and other scholars traditionally approach urban space. My method of documentation is based on presenting sequences and networks of images to tell how Harlem evolved and what it gained and lost in the process. The premise behind all the work that I do is that 100 pictures are one hundred times more powerful than one picture. The more you track something, the deeper and more eloquently it speaks.”