
These haunting photographs chart the steady decline of America's poorest urban areas.

Shot by Chilean-born photographer Camilo Jose Vergara - who has spent four decades revisiting the same streets and buildings again and again - they document the metamorphosis of segregated neighbourhoods in cities like Detroit, Chicago and New Jersey.

Mr Vergara, who is based in New York, started photographing and talking to residents about the changing face of their communities in the early 1970s, and continues to this day.

'Along the way I became a historically conscious documentarian, an archivist of decline, a photographer of walls, buildings, and city blocks,' he explains.

'I discovered information about people who lived in the locations I photographed, read about events such as crimes, fires, and stores and institutions coming in or abandoning the area, and learned about historical events that had taken place nearby.'

But it's not all doom and gloom. Mr Vergara, whose photos of Michigan appear in a book called Detroit Is No Dry Bones, has also captured cityscapes which have improved over the years, as we'll see in this series of thought-provoking images.

Chilean-born photographer Camilo Jose Vergara has spent four decades revisiting the same streets and buildings to chart their rise and fall - pictured, the dilapidated Ransom Gillis Mansion in Detroit, built in 1876 and seen here in 1993

Six years later in 1999 and its roof has all but collapsed in on itself, with its imposing front section now hardly even visible

In 2000, only a year later, its brick chimney stands triumphant but alone as the rest of the mansion is swallowed by weeds

The following year, 2001, and the large house is once again revealed, the wintry trees bare around it as it sits still abandoned

Last year, Mr Vergara returned to find the building being restored, with the grass-lined pavement substantially neatened up

By the end of 2015, the makeover is complete and its looming turrets have been reinstalled, with the house split up into rental apartments

Shot here in 1981, the Holy Raiders Revivals Church on Chicago's West Madison Street is fronted with a colourful painting

Two years later in 1983 and the church has had itself a design overhaul - its name much bigger and bolder and the illustration changed

By 1988, it's been stripped of its front entirely, with the faded red front doors and its cross-shaped glass windows the only surviving features

When Mr Vergara returned in 2003, the building was in new hands and is now the Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church

Stripped down to bare bricks and a single peak above the front doors in 2014, it's hardly recognizable compared to how it was

Vyse Avenue in South Bronx, New York, was home to large block of apartments back in 1980, fronted with stone steps

Only two years later, in 1982, the entire complex has been abandoned, its windows either smashed or sealed with metal

In 1986, it was knocked down and reduced to a sad pile of rubble, with only a burnt out corner surviving from a building that once housed 400 residents

By 1994, however, a neat new row of two-story houses have replaced the old apartment block as the surrounding neighbourhood transforms

Mr Vergara started photographing Fern Street in New Jersey's Camden suburb in 1979, and here it looks fairly respectable

Almost a decade later in 1988, the street has clearly declined, with some of the houses entirely demolished leaving wide gaps

By 2003, the house on the right hand corner has been painted a vivid pink hue and now borders an empty space for parking

In 2014, the same house has gone from pink to blue and a number of trees have sprung up which weren't there before

In New York's Harlem, this building was once a colourful maroon bar called Purple Manor, photographed here in 1977

A year later in 1978, it's been repainted in a glossy black shade but still looks fairly shabby and beaten-up

By 1980, the building appears to have been split into two, with the left side now occupying a fish and chips eaterie, and the bar having changed colour once again, this time to red

Three years later in 1983, it's safe to assume that the bar has officially bitten the dust, with shutters now fronting the building

In 1990, it's all changed again - this time the left building is a kitchen cabinets store and the right one is a small grocery shop

More than a decade later in 2002, nothing remains but a boarded-up exterior, with no clues as to what it will re-open as