LAWRENCEVILLE, NJ -- Camilo José Vergara, a renowned photojournalist best known for his photo essays on the deterioration and recycling of inner city neighborhoods, will give a presentation at Rider University examining these and other issues facing urban communities today.

The presentation, titled "The New American Ghetto: Hispanic New York and Los Angeles," will be held on Thursday, April 23, from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. in the Anne Brossman Sweigart Hall Auditorium on Rider's Lawrenceville campus. The program is featured as part of the annual International Week at Rider, and is also included as part of the University Theme Program, "2001: To the Millennium and Beyond."

Born in Chile in 1944, Vergara studied sociology at the University of Notre Dame and Columbia University. For more than two decades, he has systematically studied some of the poorest and most segregated neighborhoods in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, as well as communities in smaller cities such as Newark, Camden, and Gary, IN. He regularly returns to take successive photographs of the same urban locations so he can track the way the built environment of residential areas, vacant lots, and factories changes over time.

Results of Vergara's research are portrayed in his 1995 book, The New American Ghetto, which graphically depicts the changing visual landscape of inner cities in the United States.

Vergara's photographs have been exhibited at the Municipal Art Society, the Storefront for Architecture, Columbia University, the Getty Center in Los Angeles, as well as galleries and museums in Washington, Detroit, and Baltimore, and overseas in Belgium and Italy. His essays on urban poverty, housing, architecture, and the future of the city have appeared in such publications as Metropolis, The Nation, and The Atlantic. Vergara has also been the recipient of awards from the New York State Council of the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.

For further information on the presentation, contact Dr. James Dickinson, professor of sociology at Rider University, at (609) 895-5464.

Rider University's Lawrenceville campus is located five miles south of Princeton and three miles north of Trenton on Route 206 in Lawrence Township, NJ. The campus is one-half mile south of exit 7A of Interstate 95.