Bronx dog walkers among the dangerous ruins of New York: the best photo of Camilo Jose Vergara | Art and design

I I landed in America in 1965 from Chile. I literally arrived on a banana boat. I went to the University of Notre Dame in the Midwest and then to Columbia in New York. I had a teacher – also a photographer – who taught foreign students to write and speak English better. I would try to write poetry, which he thought was terrible. I had never taken a photo before, but he encouraged me to try photography and offered to lend me money to buy a Pentax Spotmatic he had seen for sale downtown. After that, I would drive it around New York and take pictures. It quickly became clear to me how divided the city was. Half were white and the other half were black and Latino. There was tremendous segregation.

Colombia was very prosperous. The students were in good condition and many of them were children of very wealthy people. I felt out of place. Also, there is a huge sense of loss when you leave your country and don’t know anyone and are alone. It made me want to look at what was happening: see the other side and the underside of the city. I found this easily because in the late 1960s and early 1970s, deindustrialization was ongoing. Major companies and car factories were closed, there were significant job losses and store closures. This contradiction resonated with me. My family has lost a lot of money. The first part of my life was about seeing things disappear and having to settle for less and less. I was interested to see this in the US.

Walking around New York at that time could be dangerous. There was a lot of despair, but the risks were part of the excitement. It made you look more carefully around you because anything could happen. There were people using heroin on the street and looking for money to get treatment. Sometimes they would attack you, but even though they were probably younger and stronger than me, they were in such bad shape that the whole thing was happening in slow motion. Even if they attacked me with two shots in four, I could escape.

One day in 1970, I was walking around the Bronx and met these kids and their dogs. I like the contrast: the impersonality of the place but a very strong sense of personality in each person and how they were dressed, and their pride in it. I always look at the urban landscape – and I never think of people as separate from the place in which I find them. And that’s what this photo says: the group standing in front of the towers of housing developments that loom over this vast, empty lot – which later became a juvenile prison. Then there is the subway line at the back. It was a very exciting shot.

Large parts of the city were destroyed. This was my attempt to answer the question: “How do I maintain this whole damn thing?” There was a lot of good work from that period focusing on very specific New York things, like graffitied subways, people playing in the streets, etc. But my idea was to photograph its entire urban reality. This is what I tried to do, as much as possible, from the horizon to the small details. Because these places were disappearing and they didn’t seem to be coming back. And they didn’t.

Camilo José Vergara’s New York in the 1970s series is published by Café Royal Books.