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BRIAN ROSE • PHOTOGRAPHY

Architectural Photography • Fine Art
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Kickstarter campaign coming soon!

Years ago, while riding the subway with my 12-year-old son, rattling across the Williamsburg Bridge with the city spread out below us, he said to me that sometimes he felt like he was living at the center of the world. His words reminded me that when I was younger I often felt the same way. As a result, I began trying to see the city through his eyes – in the present – a newly dynamic metropolis, more diverse, less Manhattan-centric, with at least a million more people than in the '70s and '80s.

Last year, I set out with my camera to discover this new city, a multi-centered urban fabric, stitched together by the vast web of the subway system. I decided to photograph the neighborhoods at the ends of all of the subway lines in the city. I traveled by foot and by train with one camera and one lens held at my side. The result is a portrait of the city emerging from the lull of the Covid pandemic, vibrant again, messy, a polyglot of languages and ethnicities, a city threatened by a president intent on killing the goose that laid the golden egg. However, one should not forget that New Yorkers pulled down the statue of King George III on Bowling Green in 1776. They will not suffer wannabe kings or fools this time either.

2nd Edition Cover

The photographs are stunning. It's a wonderful visual record of the momentous changes witnessed in Richmond, Virginia over the past year.

- Kevin Levin

(educator, historian, and author of several books about the Civil War)

MONUMENT AVENUE

In June 2020, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, I traveled to Richmond, Virginia, to photograph the last days of the Confederate statues on Monument Avenue. As someone born and raised in Virginia, I felt an obligation to return to the place I had left behind, to confront personal demons long unaddressed, and to preserve with my camera this moment in history. What I witnessed was the remarkable political and aesthetic transformation of these bugaboos of the Civil War, now defrocked and desecrated.

The New York Times called the Robert E. Lee statue in its tranmuted state, the most important political art in the post World War II era.

Monument Avenue is sold out, but I am pleased to announce that a second edition is being released early this summer.

TIME AND SPACE ON THE LOWER EAST SIDE
METAMORPHOSIS: MEATPACKING DISTRICT

In 2010, I decided to self-publish Time and Space on the Lower East Side, a book that encapsulates 30 years of history and change in New York City. It was a big leap into the unknown, and an even bigger financial risk. The book sold out in about a year – more than 1,000 copies – all without professional PR or distribution.

A few years later, I undertook another book project, Metamorphosis, about the Meatpacking District, then and now, 1985 and 2013. That book has also sold out. I would like to do second editions – with additional pictures – of both projects. We shall see...

In the meantime, I am making both books available online. Click on the links at right.

Information about both books can be found here.

Time and Space
on the Lower East Side

Metamorphosis: Meatpacking District

Four Seasons Total Landscaping

FOUR SEASONS TOTAL LANDSCAPING

Donald Trump's 2016 campaign began with a regal glide down an escalator in his eponymously named tower on Fifth Avenue in New York. And his bid for re-election ended, so to speak, with a bizarre Rudy Giuliani press conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping in northeast Philadelphia. The reason for the venue is still not fully understood.

When I saw images of the location and advacent neighborhood with a sex shop and crematorium, I knew that this was a job for me – to explore this urban wilderness wedged between I-95 and the Amstrak Northeast Corridor mainline.

Get the Four Seasons Total Landscaping zine here.

WILLIAMSBURG, BROOKLYN: IN TIME OF PLAGUE

A comprhensive portrait of Williamsburg during the Covid-19 pandemic. From March 20th through April 20th I walked the empty streets to every corner of this sprawling neighborhood. Famous for its hipsters and gentrification, the reality is much more complex. It is a diverse place full of jarring juxtapositions in a disjunctive and often broken urban landscape.

I have witnessed this city’s ups and down for almost five decades – the bankrupt 70s, AIDs in the 80s, 9/11, Hurricane Sandy, and the city’s recent economic ascendance. This spring, with the trees bursting into bloom, the city that never sleeps came to an almost unthinkable halt. These photographs document that moment when time seemed to freeze, when the crowds dispersed, when the stage was left vacant, and, for once, the show did not go on.

IN TIME OF PLAGUE Read more here...

For Rose, Atlantic City is an almost-too-perfect metaphor for Trump’s zero-sum, winner-take-all philosophy. “He left the city desolate, with high unemployment, high vacancies. You look at Atlantic City and you see, in a very graphic way, the result of Donald Trump’s business model and his way of doing things.

– Wired

ATLANTIC CITY

When Donald Trump was elected in November 2016, I knew immediately that I needed to do something as an artist and photographer. My work has always focused on the urban/social landscape, but I've generally avoided politics. Trump's election, however, signaled a grave emergency, a threat to democracy and the freedom we take for granted as Americans.

Within days after the election, I drove down to Atlantic City on a hunch that this place, the epitome of Trumpian dystopia, would serve as a metaphor for the overall state of affairs in the United States.

I started by photographing Trump's failed casinos, and then moved to the ravaged neighborhoods adjacent to these architectural behemoths, these internalized money machines. Rather than saving a faded Atlantic City, they have sucked the life blood out of its veins and enriched grifters like Donald Trump. And the reopening of the former Trump Taj Mahal by Hard Rock International changes nothing for Atlantic City in the long term.

I am pleased to be working with Circa Press, a distinguished publisher of books on architecture and culture. And I am especially honored that Paul Goldberger, the Pulitzer Prize winning critic, has written the introduction.

-- Brian Rose

ATLANTIC CITY
Read more here...