Rose’s photographs have always focused on a society looking to rebuild, with bold buildings at their core. Previous work captured the collapse of the Berlin Wall as well as Manhattan’s lower east side in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. In these photographs, the buildings almost feel like characters in their own right: it’s as if they’re more reliable witnesses, since they’re unable to lie or hide behind a mask.
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.”
“Things are in flux in Washington, and who knows where we’ll be by the time the book hits the street,” Rose adds. “I don’t expect a photo book to bring down the president, but I do hope to ruffle some feathers. I think it’s important for artists to step up. It’s our freedom of expression that is at risk as the country slips toward authoritarianism.”
Though the project was initially inspired by the 2016 election, with a hunch that the ravages of Atlantic City “would serve as a metaphor for the overall state of affairs in the United States,” Rose says that he zoomed out, moving beyond the Trump narrative, to focus on the devastated neighborhoods next to the casino “behemoths.” The stark contrast clearly shows the long term urban planning failure that began in the 1970s, as “city leaders and urban planners were lured by the promise of casino gambling to save the city and restore its lost glamor. Untapped Cities
There are not many people in Atlantic City, and those few who do appear— a man with a cane walking down an alley, a guy riding a bike down Pacific Avenue — are often overwhelmed by their surroundings. This too feels grounded in the facts.
It’s not that Atlantic City is a ghost town — far from it — but the blank walls and parking lots do a good job hiding the humans from each other. The biggest people in Rose’s book are the models on the walls. They are advertisements for closed casinos.
Route 40
Atlantic City is my favorite photo project (and book) by Brian Rose since The Lost Border, his epic tribute to the Berlin Wall. And there is more than a little correlation between the two in that both served as the doomed, temporary monuments to the ego and deception of those who so desperately sought to subvert the reality that created them. The East German regime ultimately collapsed under its own weight, just as Trump's Atlantic City casinos ultimately folded under their own facade of grandiose fraudulence.
Based On A True Story..
With tax cuts for the uber-wealthy, the lease of public land to oil and gas companies, and the imprisonment of asylum seekers irrespective of age, Trump is playing out his Atlantic City strategy on a national level. Rose makes it clear that all of us constitute the raw materials to be dredged, stripped, and pumped for someone else’s benefit, until all value has been removed and what’s left is a barren landscape of abandoned buildings and false memories of glory days that never were.
Hyperallergic
In addition to Rose’s keen eye for composition and color, what makes Atlantic Citysuch an effective body of work is the inclusion of quotes from newspaper and magazine articles related to the rise and fall of Atlantic City, as well as individuals directly affected by the decimation of the community. These chilling quotes are contrasted with tweets from the Donald himself.
Photobook Journal
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Atlantic City
Photographs by Brian Rose
Foreword by Paul Goldberger
Circa Press, 2019
ATLANTIC CITY was born in the mid-nineteenth century and grew so big, so fast, that it captured the American imagination. It was ‘the World’s Playground’. Its hotels were the largest and finest, its nightclubs legendary. And then, as it began to fade, the casinos came. But instead of reviving the city they killed it. Chief among the villains in this piece is Donald J Trump, who built his casinos on dunes of debt and bled them into bankruptcy. On the presidential campaign trail Trump boasted of his ‘success’ in Atlantic City, how he had outwitted Wall Street and leveraged his own name for riches. He would do for America what he had done for Atlantic City, he said. And so it came to be. Brian Rose has documented what remains of the city in the aftermath of the casino explosion. The images are haunting. Atlantic City may never recover.
-- Paul Goldberger
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.
