Williamsburg, Brooklyn — © Brian Rose

Entering dangerous territory. Trump is a cornered animal.

Gravesend, Brooklyn — © Brian Rose

New York City spreads out like an endless carpet across Long island comprising the boroughs of Queens and Brooklyn. I took the D train down to Gravesend just one stop before Coney Island on the Atlantic Ocean. The streets are lined with single family houses and duplexes fronted by elaborate decorative railings and religious icons.

Gravesend, Brooklyn — © Brian Rose

It is, apparently, a mostly white neighborhood, some Asians mixed in, A number of large housing projects loom off to the east, and consistent with the segregated nature of much of New York, are predominately black. We are in Trump country, almost for sure. The cheap ostentation, the gaudy appliqué, are clues. But maybe I’m wrong. I’m out of my element here. It’s a strange world with its own peculiar culture, its own aesthetic rules.

Gravesend, Brooklyn — © Brian Rose

Many of the houses are built up above garages, I’m guessing to stay above flood waters. This area lies only a few blocks from the Lower Bay of New York harbor,

Gravesend, Brooklyn — © Brian Rose

Some of the houses are set back behind driveways and are located in the middle of the block. Very odd.

Gravesend, Brooklyn — © Brian Rose

Manicured shrubbery, and plastic tulips. This is an apartment building. Three buzzers and a well-fortified door. A wreath with a plastic bird’s nest, and to the right a wind chime. A bright turquoise hose hides behind the bush.

Calvert Vaux Park — © Brian Rose

I crossed over the Belt Parkway, which follows the contour of the shoreline in Brooklyn, and walked into Calvert Vaux Park. Vaux and Fredrick Law Olmsted were responsible for Central Park — Vaux designing many of the bridges and structures in the park. I have no idea why anyone would name this place for him.

Some of the park was under renovation, and there were two new turf soccer fields, in use by young players in uniforms. Further along I reached my destination,  a scruffy baseball field where my son was playing for his college team. Next to a parking lot reeds popped up out of the marshy ground, and a flock of ducks flew overhead.

Calvert Vaux Park — © Brian Rose

A player raked the infield dirt before the game began. A scraggly line of trees stood just behind the outfield fence, and in the distance a line of buildings in Coney Island. It was 42 degrees and windy..

Calvert Vaux Park — © Brian Rose

There was almost no place to watch the game at this field. The dugouts blocked much of the view, and there were no bleachers. Spectators stood or sat on folding chairs huddled together behind chain link fencing, wherever there was a glimpse of the field. I followed a narrow path between the dugout and some fencing, ducking beneath tree branches to reach a small area adjacent to a shed containing various tools for raking and tamping down the infield. I plopped my chair down and could just see home home plate and the infield.

Calvert Vaux Park — © Brian Rose

Baseball in New York City on barely acceptable fields in bone chilling cold. My son’s team won both games of the doubleheader. He got on the team bus, and I trudged back to the D train.

Astor Place — © Brian Rose

Last white rhinos.

41 Cooper Square, designed by Morphosis  —  © Brian Rose

Adrian Jovanovic Hall — proposed

Currently, the no name New Academic Building. A much maligned architectural wonder — largely because of its connection to Cooper’s financial problems — it was intended as a bold step into the future for the school.

Turning things around at Cooper was a community effort, but it would not have happened without the leadership of Adrian Jovanovic. His tragic death last year stunned everyone, but his inspiration remains a powerful presence. The board of trustees has adopted a plan to return to free tuition within 10 years, and hope, albeit cautious, now prevails where once there was much anguish and despair.

In that spirit, it does not diminish our individual and collective roles to say, that Adrian Jovanovic saved Cooper Union. He deserves recognition and honor.

Trade edition sold out. Limited Edition can be purchased here.

An update on my New York trilogy of books. It has been six years since I began this self-publishing journey, first with Time and Space on the Lower East Side, then with Metamorphosis, Meatpacking District, and finally with WTC.

Time and Space came about after being turned down by a couple of publishers. I felt strongly that this was a book that had an audience. I made a mockup using Blurb, the print-on-demand internet platform, and offered it for sale at St. Mark’s books, the legendary bookstore that, sadly, closed a couple of years ago. Surprisingly, I quickly sold out 10 copies of this rather expensive, digitally printed  paperback.

I decided to find a way to self-publish, and ended up by chance talking to photographer Bill Diodato in a pizza restaurant after one of our sons’ Little League games. It turns out he was a photo book collector and was interested in working with me on my publishing project. I’m not sure that any of this would have happened without Bill’s know-how and enthusiasm. We used his imprint, Golden Section Publishers, for all three books.

I employed Kickstarter to help fund Time and Space — and used it for the next two books as well. Kickstarter is crowd funding, of course, but it is also a way to build a base of support. Running a campaign is a tremendous amount of work, and nerve wracking as hell. I’m not sure I want to do another one any time soon.

Trade edition can be purchased here. Limited edition sold out.

After Time and Space came out, I discovered a box of negatives hiding on a shelf of my film and print archive. In it were several dozen pictures of the Meatpacking District that I made in 1985. I had developed the film but never printed any of it. So, I scanned the negatives and was confronted with a series of stark and powerful images of an utterly empty, ravishingly decrepit New York.

Unlike the Lower East Side project, where I re-photographed the neighborhood, but only rarely restaged the original shots, these images of the Meatpacking District demanded a more conventional before/after approach. It was a lot more difficult making the after photographs than the befores. Those were made over several days in the dead of winter, crusty snow and slimy cobblestones underfoot. The new ones required repeated visits to the same locations, waiting for the light, for traffic and herds of people, and for photographic lightening to strike. It did a few times, fortunately.

Trade and limited edition can be purchased here.

Thanksgiving 2014 I was on a train going to Connecticut to a friend’s house, when lightening struck again. This time, a sudden realization, that I had in my archive, the basis for a book that chronicled the history of the World Trade Center. WTC was cobbled together from various projects, starting with color images I made as a student at Cooper Union in the 1970s. It ends with a series of photographs of One World Trade, the intended replacement for the destroyed Twin Towers. Like my other books, WTC takes in the changes that have transformed New York over several decades.  For me, it is a visual requiem, an homage to the resilience of this great city.

I didn’t start out thinking there would be three books. It happened organically, building on the work I did years ago, tying up loose ends, retracing my steps as a young photographer. It’s hard to say what is considered success in this business — at this point I’ve sold close to 3,000 books — which is a lot considering that this was done without an established publisher or distributor. The trade edition of Time and Space is sold out, and there are only 100 copies of Metamorphosis remaining. As of this week, the limited edition of Metamorphosis has sold out.

Would I have done three books in six years with a real publisher? Not a chance. Would I have made more money with a real publisher. Certainly not. Am I ready to do another book on my own? Maybe, maybe not. After all the blood sweat and tears that went into my New York trilogy, it would be nice to work next time with a supportive publisher.

To all who have bought one of my books — thank you!

SUNY Maritime campus, The Bronx — © Brian Rose

It’s opening day for the New York Mets tomorrow — Citi Field is out there somewhere to the left of the umpire standing near second base. That’s the Whitestone Bridge in the distance, and beyond that you can just make out the skyscrapers of Manhattan. We’re in the Bronx at Maritime College. And while the Yankees will be making their debut in the Bronx next week, my son, who plays for SUNY Purchase, has been going at it since late February.

Less than a week ago, the field was covered in snow, and there are piles of the stuff out of view to the left. It’s 42 degrees with a stiff breeze. About 75 of us, mostly parents bundled in full winter gear, sit on folding camp chairs or metal bleacher seats. The grass is brownish green and the infield clay is  damp and lumpy, but it’s a lot better than the high school fields my son played on last year.

Baseball in New York City. Over the PA they’re playing “Thank God I’m a Country Boy.” And then, finally, Frankie: “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere, it’s up to you, New York, New York.

Kent Avenue, Williamsburg, Brooklyn — © Brian Rose

Walked by the new building at 325 Kent Avenue designed by SHoP, and took a peak at the lobby.

Plusses and minuses. There are plusses and minuses to everything. I’ve been following the story of Cambridge Analytica for at least a year — and only now the full story is spilling out. The collusion with Facebook to manipulate the 2016 election and put Trump in the White House is disturbing to say the least.

I have never been a fan of FB for any number of reasons. i hate the look and feel of it. But most of those reasons are trivial against the benefit of having  access to a community of friends — real friends — not just Facebook friends. Most important to me was the way Cooper Union alumni came together on FB to debate the issues confronting the school, and to ultimately prevail in getting things back on the track to free tuition.

But FB has shown itself to be a bad actor — an egregiously bad actor.

Here is a useful article about deleting one’s account or other less drastic options. I’m waiting to see how things shake out in the near term. I’m leaning towards saying good bye. I’m weighing the plusses and minuses.

JR at the Armory Show — © Brian Rose

We are living in perilous times. A raving maniac sits in the White House — people are being rounded up and deported — environmental regulations are being rolled back — and the Russians are blackmailing the President of the United States.

You would not know any of that from the Armory Show in New York. Except for JR whose powerful images of immigrants from an earlier time pierce the mood of tax break excess.

West 54th Street — © Brian Rose

Across the street from the Armory Show. White bike and salt.

West 54th Street — © Brian Rose

Five minutes later, on the next block.

Stubenrauchstrasse, Berlin/Potsdam, 1987

I recently received a nice email from someone who now lives in this street in Potsdam on the edge of Berlin. She’s part of a group that wants to more accurately document the path of the Berlin wall that used to snake through her neighborhood. You can see the border fencing reappearing in the street in the background. The fortifications did not always follow the border precisely, and in fact, sometimes deviated to accommodate existing houses, public infrastructure, and waterways. West Berlin subway lines passed under East Berlin, and even through eastern stations that were closed off and guarded.

I kept a journal of my travels along the Iron Curtain and Berlin Wall, and the following excerpt pertains to the photograph above. It’s taken verbatim from my hand written notebook. “Anamarie” is my dear American friend, and occasional collaborator, still living in Berlin.

Thursday, 26 February, 1987

Today, Anamarie and I went back to Steinstücken in hopes of more favorable sunlight at the S-Bahn crossing into the DDR. The light was still not good, so we went to a nearby community called Kohlhasenbrück where the S-Bahn and other trains leave West Berlin through a corridor formed by walls. On one street the houses back up to the wall—large upper middle class houses from before the war. One, from the 20s or 30s was designed in a radically modern fashion. Across the street from these fine houses was a camping ground full of trailers, empty for the winter. Next to the wall was a platform that provided a bizarre view of similar handsome houses over the border. Obviously, this was all over the neighborhood. The inner and outer barriers are very close together here and one can watch the DDR citizens going about their business. It’s disturbing, voyeuristic and every word for strange that can be thought up. The DDR people did not look at us though we were obviously illuminated by bright sunlight. This community, I believe, was originally as a whole a suburb of Potsdam, which is just outside of Berlin. Now, half is on the West Berlin side, and other half, divided the wall, belongs exclusively to Potsdam and East Germany.

The Lost Border, The Landscape of the Iron Curtain is available on Amazon, but signed copies are available only from my website here.

Trump Plaza, Atlantic City, 2017 — © Brian Rose

On this turbulent day, with a nor’easter crawling up the coast, when Donald Trump seems more unhinged than ever, it seems appropriate that the abandoned Trump Plaza in Atlantic City would start coming apart.


Trump Plaza

On this tumultuous day when it is reported that billionaire Carl Icahn, friend of Trump, dumped his steel and aluminum stocks just before Trump announced trade tariffs on those commodities, let us not forget that the Trump Plaza — or what is left of it — is owned by the very same Carl Icahn.

Cooper Union — © Brian Rose

Peter Cooper statue by Augustus Saint-Gardens and the Cooper Union Foundation Building.
On the road back to free tuition. There is now a plan, but one requiring focused effort on the part of all, and trust, perhaps, in the vicissitudes of fortune.

American Grotesque

The innocent victim, wounds hidden beneath pillow, the wholesome family, white coated doctor, white roses, heart balloons, the gleaming modern hospital, president and first lady posed slightly to foreground. Smiles all around. Another day, another school shooting. 🙂

Prufrock Coffee, Leather Street, London — © Brian Rose

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

We stumbled upon Prufrock Coffee in Leather Street in Clerkenwell, a formerly industrial area, now full of architecture and design firms — and the gallery where my photograph is hanging. Not only was the coffee good at Prufrock, so was the food. I had an avocado toast served on a rugged slice of brown bread doused in olive oil and sprinkled with chili pepper flakes. Renee had an amazing “sandwich” featuring peas and a perfectly soft boiled egg on top.

We’re headed back to New York today.

Sto Werkstatt, London

At the opening of the exhibition Building Images at Sto Werkstatt in London, which features the 20 shortlisted photographs for the Architectural Photography Awards. My wife, Renee Schoonbeek on the right.

Sto Werkstatt, London

My photograph of Atlantic City.

My photograph (above) from my Atlantic City project was shortlisted for Architecture Photograph of the Year 2017 and will be exhibited In London — opening this Thursday. I will be present at the opening Thursday evening, and will be in London through Sunday, if anyone is interested in a meet up. I haven’t been to London in quite a while — should be fun.

Building Images #exhibitions@stowerkstatt, London opens on Friday 9th February until 27th April showcasing the winner and finalists of the #Architectural#Photography Awards https://t.co/XYYGn1sy53

— Arch_Photo_Awards (@ArchPhotoAwards) February 5, 2018

Book Cover Proposal

I’ve been working on a book dummy of my Atlantic City photographs. This a closeup of the former Trump Plaza casino hotel, and the crest once had a Trump logo in the center oval. Imagine the lettering ATLANTIC CITY stamped in gold foil.

Here’s what the interior pages look like:

The book includes approximately 50 photographs with text on the left and images on the right. The text pieces are a combination of personal observations, quotes from various newspapers and online media, and screenshots of Donald Trump’s tweets about Atlantic City. Fifteen tweets to be exact.

They’re great. What can I say.

Yes, sad for all the haters and losers. And for the United States of America now that Donald Trump has dumped Atlantic City and taken his carney show on the road..

This is a book that needs to get published — I just don’t know if anyone will take it on. I certainly don’t have Trump’s savvy for flim-flammery. But I do have a book that is urgent, poignant, and, in my opinion, important.

Richmond, Virginia (35mm Kodachrome) 1971

I’ve been think a lot lately about the early days of color photography, and I’ve done a number of posts on the subject in the past. I am making a proposal to do an exhibition at Cooper Union about the school’s role in the emergence of color photography in the 1970s. I don’t know if the idea will get traction or not — it will take a lot of work to put together.

The picture above was taken when I was 16 or 17 — around 1971. I had just gotten a camera and was shooting black and white primarily. One day I ran a roll of Kodachrome through the camera and ended up with several pictures that resonated deeply with me. All I could do at first was look at the slides through a little viewer — I didn’t even have a projector. So, I got a few drug store prints made, and the seed was planted. I go back to this image from time to time as a reminder of what got things started.

Here’s what I looked like back then.

Brian Rose self portrait (35mm Kodachrome) — 1972

Caesar’s garage, Atlantic City (4×5 negative) — © Brian Rose

Difference in scale — almost a photographic genre in itself — is stupefyingly on display in Atlantic City. And every city planning truism about livable streets has been blown to smithereens. Learning from Las Vegas, AC gets a PhD in architecture.

I am torn between celebrating the wanton caziness of it all and seeking the smug moral high ground on this low lying spit of sand. Atlantic City seems to be imploding at the same time as it is once again being resurrected. The story goes on — the gamblers play on in windowless rooms — while the waves crash closer and closer to the boardwalk.