How The Other Half Worships

"...houses of worship are a persistent feature of the postindustrial urban landscape. And Camilo Jose Vergara is their chronicler. Vergara, an inquisitive churchgoer and intrepid photographer, has been shooting urban settings for more than 25 years. The winner of a MacArthur genius grant, he's long been obsessed with recording inner-city religious rituals in America."

"His new volume of photos, How the Other Half Worships (Rutgers University Press, $49.95, 286 pp.), is an attractive and unusual coffee-table book at the intersection of art, urban studies and religion. A fascinating, thorough and fair look at urban Christianity, Vergara’s images of people and places span four decades, encompassing 21 cities from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, including a wealth of images of Detroit’s storefront churches."

"Part-documentarian, part-sociologist, Vergara casts a wide net, capturing traditional houses of worship that must take on new denominations or risk perishing, storefronts that 'open and close like flowers in spring,' massive megachurches that pull in worshippers from miles away, and churches slowly built by small crusading congregations on a cash-only basis."