New York/Reality Based Community

Summer reading, Photography After Frank, by Philip Gefter -- © Brian Rose

''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

From an October 17, 2004, New York Times Magazine article by Ron Suskind, quoting an unnamed aide to George W. Bush

***

All the discussion these days about what is real in photography (now that Photoshop has largely replaced the darkroom) leaves me troubled, and I've been struggling to come up with a few comments that might add something to this already over debated issue. So, a few points.

In recent years we have seen a dramatic erosion in the validity of facts, and the value of language used to describe those facts. Torture is referred to as "enhanced interrogation," an invasion resulting in tens of thousands of deaths is justified by 9/11, however specious, along with fictional weapons of mass destruction, and outright lies about people and issues are described, albeit satirically, as having "truthiness."

At the same time, photographers, like the now infamous Edgar Martins--see here and here--have been going around asserting that facts are by definition mediated, everything is contingent, throwing around quotes from French philosophers, and generally saying there's essentially no difference between one image and another--staged, manipulated, or merely framed in a camera.

The reason I am troubled by all this is because I see artists and photographers employing the same conceptual ideas about fact and reality as the politicians who have been, and are still, bending reality to suit their ends--after all, facts are mediated, and can be altered to create some larger truth, as one defines it. It's not that photographers are at heart right wing conservatives. I suspect they are mostly liberals. But they are, unwittingly, playing the same mind games as the political shape shifters who "create their own reality."

I recently read Animal Farm, the Orwell novel to my 10 year old son. It's basically an allegory about communism, how it started out idealistically, and rapidly turned poisonous under an authoritarian leader. The original seven commandments of the movement were gradually altered, history was rewritten, and heroes defiled and erased--just as the Soviets air brushed Trotsky out of their photographs. My son was beside himself as facts were distorted piece by piece by Napolean the pig leader, and not knowing anything about Stalin, he exclaimed, he's like George Bush!

I am not making a case for straight over staged or Photoshopped photography. (Nor do I think that photography will save us from tyrannny.) From the very beginning of the medium there have been those who used the camera to describe what they saw in front of them and others who sought to create staged realities, and there have always been those who looked inward as much as outward. The Pandora's Box of Photoshop is here to stay, and we can debate the ethical and moral issues that arise ad nauseum. Yes, it is true that all depictions of reality are suspect. But once we acknowledge that fact, it becomes--at least for me--a concept that changes nothing. It's like multiplying by one.

The market currently favors staged and manipulated imagery--artifice makes photography more like painting and sculpture, which get higher prices. We've been here before. But it does not change what I believe is the basic and enduring nature of photography--an intrinsic connection to real places, real structures, and real people, however dodgy the concept of real is. If we give up on the notion of transmitting reality then we run the risk of handing the world off to those who have no qualms about "making stuff up," to quote Sarah Palin, whose allegiance is not to truth, but to "a higher calling."

New York/Houston Street

Houston and Lafayette Streets -- © Brian Rose

Sometimes it seems like half he pictures on this blog are from Houston Street, especially the area between Broadway and Lafayette Street. It's just that I'm there all the time coming and going, heading for the subway, walking across town, whatever. There's been construction going on for years, rebuilding the underground infrastructure, resurfacing the pavement, and redesigning the streetscape.

Houston Street was--a long time ago--an ordinary width New York street. But at some point in the first half of the 20th century it was greatly expanded as subway tunnels were excavated, buildings were torn down, and we were left with this great gash across the urban landscape. It remains a noisy, near freeway--scene of much pedestrian and bicycle carnage--in the middle of this otherwise ped-friendly city.

That said, I love the visual chaos of it all, and today I was headed for the West 4th Street basketball court--sometimes called the cage--to continue working on this crazy project of photographing basketball with a 4x5 view camera. I set up my tripod just out of bounds behind one of the baskets, positioning myself as discreetly as possible, to avoid players crashing into me and my camera. You can't shoot from behind the chain link fence because there's not enough space for a wide angle lens to poke through.

At one point someone kicked a stray basketball from the other end of the court sending it rocketing directly, though not intentionally, at my camera. With the practiced awareness and dexterity of years of playing street basketball, I reached around the camera, and knocked the ball away. After the game, one of the players came over and expressed his surprise, if not amazement, that I had reacted so quickly.

New York/The Bowery

The Bowery and Bond/E2nd Street -- © Brian Rose

Three views of the radically changed north end of the Bowery/Third Avenue. These are from my Sigma DP1, but I did similar images with the 4x5 view camera.


Third Avenue and E5th Street -- © Brian Rose


Third Avenue and E7th Street -- © Brian Rose

The new Cooper Union building designed by Thom Mayne of Morphosis nears completion.

New York/LES

Delancey and Clinton Streets, The Lower East Side -- © Brian Rose

Without comment.

New York/New Museum

New Museum roof deck -- © Brian Rose

I went to the New Museum today to see the David Goldblatt exhibition--photographs of South Africa taken over a long period of time. I will write something about the show once i've had a chance to digest.

New York/Capa's Falling Soldier

Falling Soldier -- Robert Capa

I have always found something dubious about Robert Capa's famous photograph of the falling soldier--it seemed like a Hollywood depiction of a man being blown off his feet by a bullet. Minus the squib. Where did the soldier get hit anyway? Can't tell from the photograph.

Now, a researcher, José Manuel Susperregui, has concluded that the photograph was not taken where Capa claims it was, and in fact was made in an area that was not a battlefield at the time. That means, presumably, that Capa's whole series of photos from the front was faked. Others counter that more research needs to be done.

Whatever.


Robert Capa and Ernest Hemingway

Capa's falling soldier is a famous photograph because of the Capa mystique--the swashbuckling photojournalist, Republican partisan, romantically partnered with Gerda Taro, etc.

From the New York Times:

His fearlessness awed even his soldier subjects, and between battles he hung out with Hemingway and Steinbeck and usually drank too much, seeming to pull everything off with panache. William Saroyan wrote that he thought of Capa as “a poker player whose sideline was picture-taking.”

Capa, of course, went on to photograph D-Day in WWII, and died stepping on a landmine in Vietnam. None of that was faked. But strip away the Capa myth, and one is left pondering the image of the falling soldier. We are too close to see any context--no other soldiers, no evidence of a battlefield--only a grassy hillside and distant horizon defines the place. The soldier is hit--or so it seems--and starts to go down.

Capa famously said, "If your picture isn't good enough, you're not close enough." In Falling Solder, he was too close. Perhaps too close politically as well. I doubt that we will ever know exactly what transpired on that hillside, and I'm not sure I really care. It's a failed photograph.

Move along people--nothing to see here.

Trenton, New Jersey

New Jersey State Museum -- © Brian Rose

Last week I took the train down to Trenton, capital of New Jersey, a once vibrant industrial city on the Delaware River. I'd been to the city a few times--I photographed the New Jersey Statehouse some years back, and I photographed a new minor league baseball stadium--even got to take pictures during a game, which was great fun. This time I was there to scout the New Jersey State Museum, a 60s modern building adjacent to the Statehouse complex.

Walking from the train station through a largely desolate downtown on a rainy afternoon I was momentarily shocked. I guess I've spent too much time in New York and Amsterdam, both incredibly vital places.


State Street, Trenton, mid-afternoon -- © Brian Rose

Traffic was light in downtown Trenton, and several kids on banana bikes weaved down State Street oblivious to traffic, forcing cars to screech to a halt as the bikes swerved into their paths. A trickle of shoppers moved desultorily by pawn shops, sneaker and t-shirt outlets, fast food restaurants, and jewelry store windows filled with gold chains. These shops, mostly occupying small buildings cowered alongside hulking stone civic structures and office monoliths housing government bureaucrats. On the blocks beyond, were acres of parking lots and scattered commercial and residential structures, some in ruins.


Dowtown Trenton -- © Brian Rose


Dowtown Trenton -- © Brian Rose

Further down State Street I reached the Statehouse and other public buildings including my destination, the recently renovated museum. A row of handsome townhouses stood opposite. Tall trees lined the street. This being August, and the legislature out of session, the government quarter was empty. And all this marble and brick emptiness stood just a few blocks from the largely empty downtown.


Thomas Edison College/Kelsey Building-- © Brian Rose
Designed by Cass Gilbert, architect of the Woolworth Building
in Manhattan. One of many such gems sprinkled about the city.


Statehouse Annex -- © Brian Rose

There are still 80,000 people living in Trenton, and I do not mean to insult those who live there by choice or by circumstance. Undoubtedly, there are efforts being made to bolster existing neighborhoods and chart a course forward for the city as a whole. I would love to be taken around the city by someone who knows the place from within. But as a traveler passing through, I left feeling saddened, confused, wondering how things could be allowed to decline so far.

Just up the road, of course, is Princeton with its gleaming corporate office parks, research institutions, and the university, one of the greatest in the world. The dissonance between these two worlds is troubling--and not an isolated phenomenon in a society where money flows freely from one favored place to another, and even major cities are left behind, their architectural and human assets essentially abandoned.

New York/Looking Up

E12th Street -- © Brian Rose

While shooting an architectural assignment.



Near Penn Station -- © Brian Rose

On my way to Trenton--pictures to come.

New York/W32nd Street

Near Penn Station -- © Brian Rose

On my way to Trenton to scout a building.

New York/Queeens

Queensborough Community College, Holocaust Research Center -- © Brian Rose

Assignment work: In the past few weeks I've photographed an apartment building in Brooklyn, a residential interior in the same building, an NYU dormitory, an office in the Empire State Building, a residence for mentally disabled in the Bronx, a holocaust research center in Queens, and a series of photographs of the Hudson Square area of Manhattan. Next on deck, the Museum of the State of New Jersey, and a Columbia University academic building.

New York/On a Speeding Train

Sunnyside Yards, Queens -- © Brian Rose

I've been busy lately. A number of assignments after a barren winter and spring. I get an email from the publisher of the Lost Border--this has been a particularly brutal year for the bookselling and publishing industries...

Basically they are telling me that my book is being remaindered--conveniently timed to the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Brilliant marketing strategy. Give the books away at the moment when interest in the subject will be at its peak.


Long Island City, Queens -- © Brian Rose

Speeding through the city on a moving train. I am pleased, however, to contribute some of my Iron Curtain photographs to a literary project timed to the 20th anniversary of the end of the Wall, a book titled The Wall in my Head.

The Wall in My Head combines work from the generation of writers and artists who witnessed the fall of the Iron Curtain firsthand with the impressions and reflections of those who grew up in its wake and whose work, childhoods, and memories are all colored by the long shadow that it cast. The Wall in My Head provides a unique view into the change, optimism, and confusion that came with 1989 and examines how each of these has weathered the twenty years since that fateful year.

More on this later. Here is the book's website.

New York/Twin Towers

Action Car Rental -- © Brian Rose

Without comment.

New York/Hudson Square

More photographs of Hudson Square, sometimes known as the Printing District, on the west side of Manhattan bordered by the West Village, Soho, and Tribeca. These are digital images made alongside similar ones on 4x5 film.


Greenwich Street -- © Brian Rose



Dominick Street -- © Brian Rose



Varick and Dominick Street -- © Brian Rose


Renwick Street -- © Brian Rose