Gray’s Creek, Surry, Virginia

I would not be an artist were it not for the experience of seeing Weekend by Jean Luc Godard. I was a student at the University of Virginia, floundering, not sure which way to go. Afraid that my choice of majors – urban design – would lead me into a life behind a desk tinkering with zoning and environmental impact studies while the world was spiraling into the abyss. Or so it seemed to me at 19 years of age.

I enrolled in a history of cinema class and we were assigned to watch Weekend, which was showing in a campus film series. The professor told us to watch it twice. So, I went with a friend to an afternoon screening, came out dazed and bewildered, and then we talked about the film over dinner. What the hell had I just seen?!

The second time around, the film began to cohere while my sense of equilibrium was shattered, and I have never fully recovered. Weekend’s kaleidescopic amalgam of image, music, dialogue, politics, poetics, and satire changed my view of everything. I left UVA the following year with my camera and guitar, and have never looked back.

Jean Luc Godard, dead at 91.

My mother used to say that we were from broken-down aristocracy, but I had no idea what that assertion was based on, and I basically did not believe her. I had zero knowledge of my family ancestry – my mother fled an abusive home at 16 years of age, and as a result, her side of the family was basically a black hole. Certainly, wherever we had come from was long ago and, to me, of no relevance. Nevertheless, I was deeply affected by growing up in Virginia, Williamsburg to be exact, and the shadow of American history from the Revolution to the Civil War haunted me – and still does. Though I made my escape to New York, I could not, ultimately, ignore the past.

During extended pandemic downtime, I began poking around various genealogy websites, and I discovered to my astonishment, that both sides of my family go all the way back to Jamestown, the first colonial outpost in the so-called new world. And they were not common laborers. They had plantations, grew tobacco, and enslaved hundreds of captive Africans. Because my ancestors were prominent individuals who left paper trails – wills and deeds – I have been able to retrace their steps, and I can see where fortunes were made and, in the end, where fortunes were lost.

I will write in detail about these ancestors in due time, but for the moment, I want to focus on a recent discovery that is both amazing and disconcerting. Wikitree, one of the genealogy websites I use, sends out regular emails with lists of cousins and direct ancestors, usually connected to a theme. In this case, the theme was prominent African Americans. African Americans? Cousins? It turns out, surprisingly, that I am a 7^th cousin once removed from Muhammad Ali (Cassius Clay) and an 8^th cousin once removed from Martin Luther King, Jr.

How can that be? The answer is distressingly clear in both cases. There was a multi-racial child born as the result of a relationship (call it rape) between slave owner and enslaved. In the case of Ali, it appears to be a child born of an unknown slave and Henry Clay, 7^th Speaker of the House and Secretary of State under President John Quincy Adams. The common ancestor I share with Muhammad Ali is Elizabeth Hudson, a descendant of Henry Hudson, the famous explorer. Yes, I am related to him.

Martin Luther King, Jr. and I share a common ancestor in Thomas Jones, a prominent 17th-century Virginia landowner. The black/white relationship, apparently, came several generations later in Georgia, where King was born. This is the cold hard reality of slavery. It was a system and a culture of exploitation, rape, and violence. It was human trafficking for profit.

From Encyclopedia Virginia:

The historical record speaks to the ubiquity of mixed-race sexual relationships in the era of slavery: Virginia had the largest number of mixed-race enslaved people of all the southern states, totaling approximately 44,000 in 1850. While some of these sexual relationships were long-term and some enslaved men and women navigated sexually intimate relations with their enslavers and other white people in an effort to survive and secure better treatment, historians question whether any relationships under such an unequal power dynamic can be considered consensual.

So, sometimes when you start digging, you find out things – painful things. And while I am not responsible for the actions of ancestors many generations ago, I do feel it necessary to acknowledge my connection to them and to the shared history we have yet to come to grips with fully.

Broome Street 1980 – © Brian Rose / Edward Fausty

I have now completed phase one of rescanning the images from the Lower East Side project. The 1980 pictures – about 500 of them – have all been digitized at high resolution. Ed Fausty and I did these pictures over the course of a year just after graduating from Cooper Union.

Photography can seem like such a solitary and personal pursuit that it may be hard to imagine collaborating with someone else as we did back in 1980. But working with a view camera on a tripod calls for a more deliberate approach. We walked, talked, pointed, gestured, set up the tripod, peered at the ground glass beneath a dark cloth, and arrived, often quickly, at a visual consensus. We did not argue, as I recall.

When I first scanned these images back in the mid-2000s, I shuffled through the 4×5 sheets of film and picked out what I thought were the strongest. Our contact prints from back in the day were hastily made and hard to use for critical assessment. Many were missing. I initially tried making traditional analog prints from the negatives but discovered that the film had badly shifted out of balance. Scanning and color-correcting was the only way to recover the original balance, a painstaking process that sometimes required a couple of hours for a single image.

The photograph above is one of many that I somehow missed the first time around.

Andre Volten studio in Amsterdam Noord – © Brian Rose

In the late ‘90s, I was commissioned to photograph the neighborhood surrounding Mercatorplein, a public square, in Amsterdam. It was an area in the west of the city created to house ordinary working families, but over the years, a homogeneous Dutch population had given way to immigrants, many from Morocco, and much of the unique Amsterdam School architecture was in poor condition. A major renewal of the area was underway, and it was decided that a photographic survey documenting the transformation was called for. I was living in Amsterdam at the time with my wife, Renee Schoonbeek, a Dutch urban planner, and the work, more or less, fell into my lap. The result was my first book, “Mercatorplein, An Image of the World in Amsterdam.”

Mercatorplein, Amsterdam, 1997 – © Brian Rose

Mercatorplein, the public square itself, was being redesigned, and I was asked to photograph the model of a sculptural element to be placed in the new square. The sculptor was André Volten, one of the most important post-war Dutch artists, whose work was prominently displayed throughout Amsterdam and the Netherlands. I went to his studio in a rough-edged industrial area in the north of Amsterdam. His studio, where he also lived, was a whitewashed modernist rectangular box. A high hedge surrounded the back garden creating a small oasis screened off from the adjacent factories and warehouses. There we sat for about an hour sipping wine and talking about our work. The model I photographed was a short distance from Volten’s studio in a machine shop that produced the majority of his steel sculptures. The model was tabletop-size and featured a spiral fountain and a circle of chairs, cast in steel.

A year later, I was invited to the dedication of the newly rebuilt Mercatorplein, which included the piece I had photographed, now at full scale. Andre Volten and I sat next to each other on bleachers as speeches were made and children gave a musical performance. It was rainy, but the mood was festive. Sitting directly in front of us was Koningin Beatrix, the Queen of the Netherlands. At one point she turned around and warmly greeted André Volten, and he introduced me to the queen who said she was pleased to meet me in unaccented English.

Untitled, Amsterdam, André Volten – © Brian Rose

Some years later, living full time in New York, I heard that André Volten had died. And I saw that Mercatorplein had again been redesigned, and his sculptural fountain and stone chairs were removed. Where they went, I did not know. Looking for outdoor things to do during the current Covid lockdown, I suggested we take the ferry over to Amsterdam Noord (North) and look for André Volten’s studio. The ferry dock on the other side is clearly marked by a monumental Volten sculpture, two columns with interlocking steel rings on the edge of the water. We found the studio without too much trouble and discovered that it was now a dedicated Volten archive, though not open to the public in the midst of the pandemic. The grounds, sadly, were scraggly, and the hedge that shielded the garden where I sat with Volten was partially broken down. The place looked a mess.

Volten garden with unknown sculpture – © Brian Rose

In the back, in a field, was Volten’s Mercatorplein sculptural ensemble, looking forlorn and out of place.

Volten/Mercatorplein sculptural ensemble – © Brian rose

André Volten’s studio was originally the gatehouse of a housing complex called Asterdorp, built in 1926 for “socially maladjusted families.” The idea was for them to live in a closely monitored community for a time, and then move into normal communities once it was determined that they were adequately socialized. The entire community was walled-in and the only way in or out was through the gatehouse. For a brief period at the beginning of World War II, Rotterdamers who had been bombed out of their homes were relocated in Asterdorp, and after the Nazis occupied the city, it become a temporary residence for Jews being sent to the transit camp Westerbork, or to death camps like Auschwitz. It was sometimes called “Klein Westerbork.” After the war, Asterdorp was demolished and only the gatehouse remained, empty for a number of years. André Volten took it over in 1950 and lived and worked there until his death in 2002.

Robert E. Lee, Monument Avenue, Richmond – © Brian Rose

As the city of Richmond dismantles the pedestal that once supported Robert E. Lee high above Monument Avenue, the grand boulevard of the Lost Cause, the news comes that Charlottesville has made a decision about their Lee statue, presently in storage.

According to the Washington Post, “…the Charlottesville City Council voted 4-0 to hand it over to the only local bidder: the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, a Black-led museum that proposed repurposing the metal entirely.”

The museum intends to melt down the statue and create from the bronze some kind of new artistic work.  Andrea Douglas, the executive director of the center says, “It really is about taking something that had been harmful and transforming it into something that is representative of the city’s values today.”

Robert E. Lee, Monument Avenue, Richmond– © Brian Rose

It sounds like an extension of what the protesters did when they transformed the meaning of the statues and memorials on Monument Avenue by taking possession of them and covering them with an exuberant, and often profane, kaleidoscope of graffiti. It was a transient moment in time, of course, and leaves unanswered what to do with the vanquished statues, and what to do with the public spaces they once commanded. Charlottesville is seeking a way to accomplish both tasks.

But let us consider, as this proposal goes forward, the artist who created the Robert E. Lee slated for meltdown. Henry Shrady was a largely self-taught sculptor from New York who had risen quickly in a field dominated by such luminaries as Daniel Chester French and Augustus St. Gaudens. His studio was in Westchester County and most of his statues, including Robert E. Lee, were cast at the Roman Bronze Works in Brooklyn.

George Washington at Valley Forge, Williamsburg, Brooklyn – © Brian Rose

Shrady’s father was a celebrated physician who had served as a consulting surgeon to Ulysses S. Grant in his last days. The Shrady statue I know best is his George Washington at Valley Forge, which stands at the approach to the Williamsburg Bridge on the Brooklyn side of the East River. It is a moody depiction of a steadfast Washington cloaked against the winter cold. His most important work is the Grant memorial in front of the Capitol in Washington, D.C. Grant sits astride his horse facing the Lincoln Memorial surrounded by lions and flanked by highly energetic battle tableaux, one of an artillery team, the other of a cavalry charge. Many smaller works by Shrady are in the collections of major museums including the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

Sculptors like Shrady rose to prominence in conjunction with the City Beautiful movement, inspired by the European Beaux-Arts, which was prominently on display in the architecture for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The movement inspired the design of major urban projects like Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia, Grand Army Plaza in New York, and Monument Avenue in Richmond.

Despite Robert E. Lee’s betrayal of Lincoln and the country he was sworn to defend, Lee’s nobility of character was widely assumed, even by many in the North. Shrady took the commission in Charlottesville telling his sponsor, Paul Macintyre, “I am going to make this the best thing I ever did, as I am a great admirer of Gen. Lee.” Of course, the commission came with a $30,000 fee, which is approximately $650,000 in today’s money.

Ulysses S. Grant Memorial, Washington, D.C. – © Brian Rose

For me, the greatest irony is that when the white supremacist mob stormed the Capitol building on January 6, 2021, they had to pass directly by Shrady’s Grant memorial, perhaps the most important symbol of the triumph of the Union over those who sought its destruction in order to preserve the institution of slavery.

Melting down the Charlottesville Robert E. Lee dishonors the artist who created this epic expression of national purpose in Washington, and while the intention is to transform the Lee statue into something constructive, to me it feels more like negation.

In the research I’ve been doing of my family roots, I continue to make astounding discoveries, sometimes sobering. Many of my Virginia ancestors were slaveholders, that is clear. On my father’s side of the family, one of my third great grandfathers is Arthur Crumpler. Googling his name I found another Arthur Crumpler, whose father was enslaved on a plantation owned by Benjamin Crumpler in Southampton County, Virginia, probably my 4^th great grandfather. It is quite likely that he took his name from my ancestor, Arthur Crumpler.

The enslaved Arthur did not slip into the oblivion of history that befell many African Americans who were moved from one plantation to another, who were separated from families, who had no last names other than their masters, and who were buried in unmarked graves, many of which have been plowed under. Arthur’s life story was preserved because he escaped slavery, traveled to Boston, and married Rebecca Lee, who was the first Black female physician in the United States.

We know this history primarily because the Boston Globe published an article in 1878 entitled “Boston’s Oldest Pupil,” a profile of Arthur Crumpler who was enrolled in an evening reading class. The article is obviously based on an interview with Arthur with many direct quotes and specific details.

The Boston Globe:

Arthur Crumpler was born a slave in  Southampton County, near Jerusalem Court House, Va., two miles from the Tucker Swamp meeting house, on the estate of Robert Adams, a large Virginia land and slave holder. His father, Samuel, was a slave on the estate of Benjamin Crumpler, which adjoined the Adams estate. His mother was a part of the Adams estate, and Arthur Crumpler as well as his other brothers and sisters, following the condition of the mother, according to slave code of Virginia, became at birth also a portion of the Adams estate. Arthur grew up a boy in Southampton County on the Adams estate.

Robert Adams died when Arthur was 9 years old, and the estate was divided among the Adams children, but Arthur was not eager to be sold off and sent to another plantation. So, he challenged the eldest Adams son, with whom he had a good relationship, to a wrestling match.

We were all standing around waiting to be sold. I went up to John, and to him in a boyish, defiant way, “John, I can wrestle you down!” I was very strong when a boy. He said I couldn’t. Well, we had good tussle, and I tussled him so hard, that he would not let me be sold, but took me himself, and until the war, kept me ever near him.

Arthur moved with John Adams to Smithfield in Isle of Wight County, acquired blacksmithing skills, and when the Civil War broke out, escaped to Fort Monroe across Hampton Roads, which remained in the hands of the Union army throughout the war. He eventually made his way to Boston where he met Rebecca Davis Lee, who in the same year, 1864, became the first Black female physician in the United States. At the end of the war, she and Arthur moved to Richmond, Virginia where she worked for the Freedman’s Bureau, the federal agency tasked with helping newly emancipated Blacks make the transition from bondage to freedom. She wrote that she treated “a very large number of the indigent, and others of different classes, in a population of over 30,000 colored.” In 1869 the Crumplers returned to Boston where Rebecca Lee wrote a medical book that may well be the first medical text by an African-American author. She dedicated the book “to mothers, nurses, and all who may desire to mitigate the afflictions of the human race.”

The Globe article concludes with an account of Arthur Crumpler’s attempt to find his sister in North Carolina. He was unsuccessful, but upon his return to Boston, he discovered that one of her children had come looking for him. “They met by accident. He learned that his master had lost everything in the war, and died in poverty. The slaves on the old estate were scattered all over the country. Some prosperous and others were not.”

I have tried to confirm that the Benjamin Crumpler who owned a plantation adjacent to Robert Adams was, in fact, my 4^th great grandfather – the records are compelling, though not conclusive. However, I did find an inventory of the Adams estate dated at the right time and witnessed by “Benjamin Crumpler.” Among the material items listed, there are a number of “negroes.” One of the names is a “boy Arthur $175.”

I think I have found 9-year-old Arthur Crumpler.

We had a very nice Thanksgiving yesterday with friends from overseas. We had a traditional turkey dinner, though not with a bird anywhere near the size of Norman Rockwell’s amazing levitating monster in “Freedom from Want.”

I am reminded of the time a group of students from my high school, a Catholic school in Virginia, delivered a turkey to a poor Black family living in a house on the outskirts of town. It was a gesture of goodwill, wildly misguided. Perhaps, even offensive.

When we arrived at the house – a bunch of fresh-faced White kids in school uniforms – it was obvious that our giant frozen turkey would not fit into the refrigerator, nor would it fit into the small oven, of this tiny shack with a cinderblock step at the front door, toys scattered on the bare earth around the yard. Nevertheless, the young mother who lived there, maintaining her dignity, graciously accepted the gift.

W19th Street, NYC – © Brian Rose

2020 was for most of us a traumatic year of pandemic and protest culminating in the defeat of Donald Trump in November. Directly after election day, we waited nervously for the media to make the call for Joe Biden. Rudy Giuliani held a press conference in Philadelphia at the Four Seasons – it turned out not to be the hotel in Center City – but rather Four Seasons Total Landscaping in a forlorn part of northeast Philly. In the middle of the press conference in which he and Trump spokesperson Corey Lewandowski made unproven charges of fraud, the Associated Press called the election for Biden. Chaos and much hilarity followed.

Many of the reporters dashed off while others decided to visit the immediate area, which included a crematorium and a sex shop called Fantasy Island.

I knew immediately that I needed to go to Philadelphia and photograph the landscape surrounding Four Seasons Total Landscaping. So, I rented a car, dragged my 22-year-old son along as bodyguard, and drove down, about 2 hours away from New York. The day was beautiful, the environment stunningly rich. At least rich to me. Wedged between Interstate 95 and the Amtrak Northeast Corridor tracks, it’s an area full of chop shops, small factories, warehouses, a scattering of houses, and a superfund site. Tall billboards punctuated the sky adjacent to I-95, and a Sunoco logo with an insistent arrow pointing down as if intentionally saying this is the place.

I’ve put the pictures up on my website, and everyone is invited to enjoy this strange landscape, a portrait of America’s underside, often glimpsed only from a train window. I am considering doing a book as well.  Four Seasons Total Landscaping

Brian Rose 1974

Virginia Roots

I am a New Yorker, a self-identification that presupposes the likelihood that one may have come from somewhere else, from another state, or from anywhere in the world. My work as a photographer and musician emerged from the rubble and creative ferment of New York City in the late ’70s and early ’80s. But I was born and raised in Tidewater, Virginia, a place steeped in history, where English settlers in 1607 established a colony on the swampy shore of the James River, and the place where Africans first arrived on a Dutch ship as human chattel in 1619. The British surrender at Yorktown, 12 miles from where my family lived, effectively ended the Revolutionary War, and after the Civil War, Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, was imprisoned at nearby Fort Monroe, where my father worked at the end of his career with the army.

While it is possible to live in Virginia and remain relatively untouched by the existence of this powerful and ubiquitous backstory, that was certainly not the case for me. My family lived in Williamsburg, the former colonial capital, now a tourist destination, and as a child, the restored area with its manicured streets and gardens was my playground. It was a carefully buffed recreation of the 18th century suspended between reality and imagination, between document and myth. Ada Louise Huxtable, the architecture critic, once wrote: “What the perfect fake or impeccable restoration lacks are the hallmarks of time and place. They deny imperfections, alterations, and accommodations; they wipe out all the incidents of life and change.”

Brian Rose leading the Colonial Williamsburg Fifes and Drums, 1970

This ephemeral world – of neither here nor there – was, however, the actual location of my upbringing. I joined the fife and drum corps at nine years old, wore a costume with a three-cornered hat, and performed for thousands of visitors as well as two presidents of the United States. I attended church services with my father at Bruton Parish Church and was present at the noteworthy, but dimly remembered moment when Lyndon Johnson was challenged from the pulpit by our minister who called into question the president’s Vietnam policy. And when Nixon came to town for a conference, the fife and drum corps played patriotic tunes while protesters heckled from across the street. The church with its original 18th-century bell tower sat directly next door to the distinguished brick home of George Wythe, signer of the Declaration of Independence, and friend and mentor of Thomas Jefferson. Past and present were, improbably melded together, all of a piece. Yes, Williamsburg occupies a surreal performative space, but I came to understand that the kind of authenticity Huxtable pined for was, perhaps, a dubious concept in the meta-reality of modern America.

Colonial Williamsburg – © Brian Rose

Williamsburg, both the restoration and the present-day town, is dominated by its colonial-era trappings, but the Civil War’s lingering presence is never far away. There were earthen fortifications in the woods behind my house, weathered trenches, and I once found a metal uniform button hidden in the dirt. Richmond, the state and former Confederate capital, is only an hour up Route 5, a scenic two-lane highway that parallels the James River with its gracious tobacco plantations dating back to the 17th and 18th centuries. Richmond, during my youth, was a city struggling to preserve its image as a genteel southern capital. Middle-class whites were fleeing to the suburbs leaving an increasingly Black inner city, the cigarette companies had moved their plants out of town, and newly built freeways slashed through old neighborhoods and snaked through the industrial riverfront downtown. But the statues of Confederate generals loomed undisturbed on their pedestals along Monument Avenue, and the good old boys’ network carried on in the Jefferson Hotel and the Commonwealth Club. The South may have lost the war, but the honor of Robert E. Lee, the patron saint of the Lost Cause, remained undisputed.

Colonial Williamsburg – © Brian Rose

Despite the penumbra of history I lived under in Virginia, I felt oddly disconnected from the past on a more intimate level. In short, I had no grandparents. My father’s parents had died young, leaving him in the care of an older sibling, and on my mother’s side – it was less clear what happened. It seems that she had fled from an abusive home environment after graduating from high school at age 16, and never went back, never had any contact with her family. My father grew up on the southside of the James River among farmers and merchants in a small town surrounded by peanut and cotton fields not far from the scene of Nat Turner’s 1831 slave uprising. He once told me that as a child, he woke up in terror one night as a cross burned in their front yard. But he never provided any context for the story, any explanation for why they were targeted, apparently, by the Klan.

Captain John Smith statue, Jamestown, Virginia – © Brian Rose

Quite simply, I could not place myself mentally or physically in that landscape. It did not have anything to do with me, or so I believed. My father, in his own way, rebelled by leaving home to attend the University of Virginia. He was the first Rose to go to college. When my father died, my sister and I scattered his ashes in Gray’s Creek, a small tributary of the James River. We understood instinctively that the James was the central element of his life. The journey he had made from one side of the river to the other was not far as the crow flies, but it represented a more profound journey of personal renewal from country to city, from the old South to the new. My mother, always strong-willed and fiercely independent, with a statuesque bearing that made her seem taller than she was, vaguely used to talk about coming from broken down aristocracy – that it was all lost in the Great Depression she said – but there was no family to interact with, no one to confirm the story, and no homestead. I shrugged it off.

Over the years, I wondered about the history I never had, but I was determined to create a new identity for myself untethered to my Virginia roots. Like my father, I attended UVA, briefly studying urban design, and eventually graduated from New York’s Cooper Union. After school, I pursued a career focused on the documentation of cultural and historical landscapes. Most notably, I photographed the Lower East Side, the famous immigrant neighborhood of New York, and then in 1985 began photographing the Iron Curtain, the Berlin Wall, and the subsequent rebuilding of Berlin. In 2016, I responded to the unexpected and alarming election of Donald Trump by photographing Atlantic City with its ravaged streets and bankrupt casinos as a metaphor for America as a whole.

TrumpTaj Mahal, Atlantic City – © Brian Rose

In the spring of 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic swept across the country, hitting New York especially hard, and the city was placed on lockdown by Governor Cuomo. In March and April, I wandered through the neighborhood of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, its empty streets bare and frozen – as if time had stopped for my camera – keeping a safe distance from the few others who ventured out. I self-published a book called  “Williamsburg: In Time of Plague,” marketing it on Kickstarter. And I used the quarantine time at home to begin investigating my missing Virginia roots on various genealogy websites.

What I discovered left me dumbfounded. I peeled back the family’s layers on my mother’s side all the way to Jamestown – to the first supply ship that arrived in 1608, showing up just in time to save the few dozen colonists still alive but near starvation. One of those survivors was Temperance Flowerdew who married my 12^th great grandfather, George Yeardley, the second royal governor of colonial Virginia. In 1619, fifteen of the first 25 enslaved Africans resided at Flowerdew Hundred, Yeardley’s plantation on the James River.

Another of my earliest ancestors may well have been present when Pocahontas and John Rolfe were married, an event that paused the ongoing war with the Indians, and a few years later, when the census of 1624 was taken, was found living on a plantation called Jordan’s Journey on the James River just south of Richmond. There were only 1,200 people of European descent in all of Virginia at that time. My later ancestors settled in Georgia and Mississippi – my 4th great-grandmother was a Creek Indian, and my 3rd great-grandfather died in the battle of Vicksburg fighting for the South. For unknown reasons, my grandparents migrated to Washington, D.C., and then back to Virginia. My immediate family ultimately ended up in a suburban-style ranch house on the outskirts of Williamsburg, precisely four miles from the excavations of the original fort at Jamestown.

Grays Creek, the spot where my father’s ashes were scattered – © Brian Rose

The Rose side of the family also traces its roots to Jamestown, to Surry County, directly across the river. My 7th great-grandfather, William Rose, settled in 1650 on the property adjacent to Smith’s Fort, land given to John Rolfe and Pocahontas by Chief Powhatan, precisely at the spot on Gray’s Creek where my sister and I had scattered our father’s ashes. It was as if we were all homing pigeons, somehow tuned to the way back, over centuries of time.

To a great extent, the revelation of this missing history was exhilarating, but it was distressing as well. These early Virginians were well-to-do planters, with much of their wealth derived from slave labor, not to mention that the land they claimed was essentially stolen from native people. At the same time, however, these first Virginia families were the catalysts for American democracy, and they espoused the enlightenment ideals that underpin the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, among the most remarkable achievements in western civilization. I still regard Thomas Jefferson’s UVA campus with its Roman Pantheon-inspired dome and classical colonnades as one of the greatest works of architecture in North America, an audaciously conceived beacon of learning perched on the edge of the Appalachian wilderness. This epitome of American idealism was built, however, largely by enslaved labor, and a circular granite memorial echoing the nearby Rotunda now acknowledges this integral and sobering fact.

The University of Virginia with my father, Leroy Rose

One of my great, great, great grandfathers was awarded 486 acres of land by Jefferson in appreciation for his service in the Revolutionary War. He was also, like Jefferson, the owner of slaves. And most remarkable was the story of my 3rd great uncle, who departed the Tidewater region of Virginia, like a Faulkner character, to set up a sugar plantation in Louisiana. His plantation, known as Hard Times, was in 1850 the most prosperous in the Mississippi Delta, with as many as 350 enslaved laborers working the fields and operating the sugar mill. The Civil War brought ruin and an end to the plantation economy. It did not, of course, do away with the racism underlying American society both in the South and the North. Not by a long shot.

In New York, the Covid pandemic continued, but the city’s crisis eased as people masked up and maintained social distancing. Donald Trump, unwilling to accept responsibility or listen to the advice of experts, recklessly encouraged Americans to shop, eat out, and carry on as usual as the death toll from the virus mounted across the country. Then, on May 25th, George Floyd, a Black man living in Minneapolis, was killed by a white police officer while under arrest for allegedly passing a counterfeit $20 bill. The next day a cell phone video of Floyd’s arrest was made public, the officer’s knee pressing against his throat, his gasping, repeated last words, “I can’t breathe.” The video went viral, sending shockwaves through the body politic, shattering the preternatural calm of the pandemic’s previous two months. Protesters took to the streets in Minneapolis and were met by tear gas and rubber bullets. Over the following weeks, millions throughout the U.S. marched against racism and police violence, and “Black Lives Matter” became a rallying cry taken up by a diverse cross-section of the public.

BLM protest, Williamsburg, Brooklyn – © Brian Rose

In Richmond, demonstrations focused on Monument Avenue with its statues of generals and other Confederate luminaries. These stolid ghosts of the past were suddenly reanimated in the passion of the BLM movement, and the longstanding debate surrounding these totems of the Confederacy – whether they should be removed or maintained with some sort of historic contextualization – now appeared moot. In early July, it became clear that the end of the road was approaching for Monument Avenue. On July 10th, protesters pulled Jefferson Davis from his pedestal, and two days later, I drove down to Richmond to document the last days of the grand boulevard of the Lost Cause.

Jefferson Davis Monument, Monument Avenue – © Brian Rose

In traveling to Richmond, I should point out that I have not been a total stranger to my home state since moving to New York. Over the years, I made dozens of trips to visit my parents, rendezvoused there with my sister who flew in from San Francisco and on several occasions marched down the Duke of Gloucester Street with the alumni of the Colonial Williamsburg Fifes and Drums. But this time, it felt different. I was on a mission to repossess, on my own terms, my birthright and heritage. It was not about atonement for a history I was not responsible for, but it was about seizing the moment when the past connected to the present in a circle of time, memory, and place. It felt purposeful, conscious, and I could see arrayed before me a palimpsest of genetic code and geography, like a map, like personal destiny revealed.

J.E.B. Stuart pedestal, Monument Avenue – © Brian Rose

As I stood on Monument Avenue in the low winter sun surveying the pedestals that once elevated J.E.B. Stuart and Stonewall Jackson above the crowd, and the brazenly, triumphantly, desecrated plinth of Robert E. Lee, I thought about how American democracy had nearly collapsed in a tawdry display of banner-waving, cult-like allegiance to a wannabe dictator, in a spasm of racial animus. Our better angels prevailed, just barely. We are left now with empty pedestals on Monument Avenue and a sense of loss. Not, of course, for the bronze idols promoted by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, not for the Lost Cause. And certainly, we can learn to accept, though not excuse, the imperfections of the Founding Fathers, men of their time, who arrived at Jamestown and sought to create a new world. But there is loss, nevertheless, for the pantheon of heroes we once revered, their icons now toppled or tarnished, and there is the corresponding loss of ideals displaced by voices of demagoguery and bigotry. We are left with empty pedestals on Monument Avenue as the sun comes up and I point my car north on I-95 back home to New York City.

Louise Rose, Portsmouth, Virginia, 1957

Since my mother passed away on January 16th, I have spent more time with the scrapbook she left behind that documents her work in the fight against polio in the mid-1950s. It is a remarkable collection of articles and letters that pieced together provides a narrative of events leading to what appears to be the first polio mass vaccination clinics in the United States.

One of the letters is an invitation for my mother to attend a March of Dimes meeting at its headquarters in New York to give a presentation of the program she organized in Virginia. She was 28 years old and we lived in a tiny house in a working-class section of Portsmouth near the navy shipyard. She probably made the trip alone with me and my father staying at home.

Another of the letters comes from Basil O’Connor who had been one of Franklin Roosevelt’s top advisers and the founder of the March of Dimes. He also served several years as the head of the Red Cross. O’Connor was aware of my mother’s extraordinary vaccination initiative and her fundraising prowess.

He wrote:

“Please extend my warmest thanks to each and every member of the corps of volunteers who worked so determinedly with you in the 1957 March of Dimes. I wish it were possible to express these sentiments directly and individually, because only in that way could I feel them to be completely adequate. Surely the effort that went into the campaign just past completely overshadows anything that has ever been done.”
I look back in wonderment at this letter and others like it in our archive. I was just 3 years old at the time, and my sister was not yet born, though well on the way. She arrived in August of 1957. That my mother did all of this with me, a toddler, and pregnant with my sister, is nothing less than astonishing.

McGraw-Hill Lobby, West 42nd Street, NYC – © Brian Rose

A great crime against culture and architecture has been commited by the owners of the McGraw-Hill Building. The magnificent Art Deco lobby designed by Raymond Hood has been destroyed.

https://w42st.com/post/art-deco-lobby-mcgraw-hill-tower-demolished-landmark-commission-feckless/

Brooklyn Army Terminal – © Brian Rose

A month ago in the midst of a snowy February, I made the trek down to the Brooklyn Army Terminal to receive the first of two Covid-19 vaccines. I was eligible at 66 years of age and eager to get vaccinated. It took some doing – repeatedly logging into the city’s web portal over the course of two weeks – until, boom, a date, and location popped up. I immediately jumped on it even though it was far from my part of Brooklyn.

Vaccination pods, Brooklyn Army Terminal – © Brian Rose

The Brooklyn Army Terminal is a massive complex, no longer used for military purposes, that now houses light manufacturing, technology companies, media, the kind of thing that dominates the new economy of New York. It was designed by Cass Gilbert, best known for the Woolworth Building and the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. The area around it is called Sunset Park and includes both industrial architecture and row houses. The transition from one to the other is abrupt as you walk inland away from the waterfront.

59th Street, Sunset Park, Brooklyn – © Brian Rose

59th Street, Sunset Park, Brooklyn – © Brian Rose

Although it was a long trip down to Sunset Park, I was excited about getting vaccinated, and yesterday I returned for the second of two doses of the high tech mRNA Moderna vaccine. Although the snow was mostly gone, it was a frigid day, and we had to wait outside in the cold before entering one of the vaccination pods. But I was happy, and it gave me the chance to wander briefly around this interesting part of the city.

Sunset Park, Brooklyn – © Brian Rose

Sunset Park, Brooklyn – © Brian Rose

150 Varick Street, NYC – Brian Rose and Berenice Abbot

In 2009 I had an assignment to photograph the Hudson Square neighborhood of lower Manhattan. Hudson Square was once known as the Printing District because of the large number of printing businesses that occupied the massive loft buildings along Hudson and Varick Streets just north of Canal Street.

One of the photographs I made, on the left above, shows the impressive street wall along Varick. I printed it 4×5 feet, and it was hung on the client’s office wall.

What I didn’t know until very recently, was that Berenice Abbott had made a photograph from a similar perspective in 1935. I am familiar, of course, with Abbott’s work, especially her “Changing New York” book. I have always admired her photographs – even had a chance to meet her in 1980 – but have tended to look through her, probably unfairly, to Eugene Atget, whose documentation of Paris in transition is, for me, one of the pinnacles in the history of photography. Abbott, additionally, is responsible for bringing Atget’s work to the public, and his influence on her own work is widely acknowledged.

Varick Street 1935 – Berenice Abbot

I’ve been looking at the two photographs of Varick Street side by side. They appear, at first, to be near twins. But looking further, subtle differences multiply. Abbott was aware of the same receding street wall as I was, but she aimed her camera more squarely on the building at the corner, 150  Varick Street. It was built in 1926, just nine years before her photo was taken, an early example of Deco architecture, which was a style in full swing in 1935 when Abbott was roaming the city. To her, this building expressed modernity, beautifully juxtaposed against the elegant street lamp from an earlier era. The sign above the main entrance says Westinghouse Electronics, and the lettering near the corner says Radios and Radiotrons. The buildings beyond march to the edge of the frame as if in an endless parade, while a handful of cars and trucks occupy the wide thoroughfare. This is New York of the 1930s, a burgeoning metropolis emerging from the Great Depression, a city at the forefront of all that was new and forward-looking.

Varick Street 2009 – © Brian Rose

In my picture, I have pointed my camera up the avenue, including the line of receding buildings, but not focused on any of them individually. The street is jammed with vehicles barely moving as they approach the entrance to the Holland Tunnel. The flood of traffic suggests that the city has grown since 1935, and the automobile has taken over, and a previously two-way street is now purposed as a conduit funneling cars into the maw of the tunnel. My photograph differs from Abbott’s obviously by the presence of color. The composition is held together by a number of visual details – the couple at the center with the woman’s arm upraised – the double-decker tourist bus directly behind, slightly blurred, while everything else is still – the man almost falling out of the frame at the bottom left corner. And there are spots of color stretching across the frame – the blue banner, orange banner, and yellow walk/don’t walk boxes echoing the colors of the tour bus.

Despite the superficial similarities between the two pictures, they are not simply “then and now,” a popular photographic meme. They each express different intentions and different sensibilities, both anchored to the same precise spot in the city, an 86 year span of photographic history, and the ongoing evolution of New York.

After a horrendous early spring, the pandemic began easing in New York, but the overall mood remained tense, much as it had been during the past three years of the Trump presidency. On May 25th, in Minneapolis, George Floyd was murdered by police officers while under arrest. The killing set off a wave of protests across the country, and in NYC there were massive demonstrations, largely peaceful, throughout the city. At any given moment, multiple marches sprang up almost organically in one part of the city or another, often crossing the bridges between  Manhattan and Brooklyn. I made the photograph above as several thousand marchers paraded up Wythe Avenue just down the block from my apartment in Williamsburg.

The pandemic lockdown was over, ready or not, though most people masked up and kept their distance. I followed events closely, not certain what I might do next photographically. I’m not a photojournalist, though I stay tuned to current events. I do not chase ambulances. I stay back and take in the whole horizon.

In July I became aware that protests in Richmond in my home state of Virginia were focused on the Confederate statues on Monument Avenue. I realized immediately that this was something I needed to photograph. On July 10th the statue of Jefferson Davis, former president of the Confederacy, was toppled by protesters. Two days later I left for Richmond.

The discussion about whether they should be maintained or removed had been going on for years, and suddenly the debate became moot as protesters took ownership of the statues, especially the immense monument to Robert E. Lee, covering their pedestals with graffiti, staging events, and various performances in the large grassy traffic circle around Lee.

While the focus was on the Robert E. Lee statue, all of the monuments were covered with graffiti. Skateboarders took advantage of the sloping base of the J.E.B. Stuart statue, and people walked up and down the boulevard, taking snapshots. Many of the houses along Monument Avenue had signs expressing support for Black Lives Matter.  I noticed that I was not the only serious photographer documenting the scene. TV cameras were set up next to the Robert E. Lee statue as well.

Just off of Monument Avenue on Arthur Ashe Boulevard is a statue by the African American artist Kehinde Wiley. Wiley has been doing interesting work for years, but he became something close to a household name when he was commissioned by Barack Obama to do the official White House portrait. Many of his images, whether paintings or photographs, make use of historic, classical antecedents, often depicting contemporary Black men posing in a consciously stylized manner.

In Richmond, Wiley has created an equestrian statue modeled after the J.E.B. Stuart figure on Monument Avenue. In this piece, however, the swashbuckling general has been replaced by a contemporary Black youth astride a rearing horse, posed as if in the throes of battle. Seeing the two together, albeit at opposite ends of Monument Avenue, makes for a powerful juxtaposition.

As I worked on the Monument Avenue pictures I realized that this was a book I needed to make – quite different in concept from the Williamsburg book, which was more of an open-ended exploration of a landscape, but very much a part of the ongoing story of 2020. So, I ran another Kickstarter campaign, a little worried that following up so soon with a second campaign was not a good idea. But it went well, and I raised the money I needed to do Monument Avenue Richmond

Trump madness continued through the summer into the fall, and unsurprisingly, Trump refused to accept the decisive results of the November election. His campaign in 2016 began with a regal glide down the escalator of Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue but ended (at least symbolically) ignominiously in the work yard of a landscaping company in Northeast Philadelphia.  While the 2020 votes were still being counted, the campaign announced on Twitter a press conference at the Four Seasons, which Trump assumed was the Four Seasons hotel in Center City Philadelphia. It was actually Four Seasons Total Landscaping. Why this location was chosen remains a mystery.

The media raced to the site, and Rudy Giuliani began his press conference, amid gardening equipment,  only to be interrupted by the announcement that the networks had called the election for Joe Biden. Many of the reporters dashed off while others decided to visit the immediate area, which included a crematorium and a sex shop called Fantasy Island.

I knew immediately that I needed to go to Philadelphia and photograph the landscape surrounding Four Seasons Total Landscaping. So, I rented a car, dragged my 22-year-old son along as bodyguard, and drove down, about 2 hours away from New York. The day was beautiful, the environment stunningly rich. At least rich to me. Wedged between Interstate 95 and the Amtrak tracks, it’s an area full of chop shops, small factories, warehouses, a scattering of houses, and a superfund site. Tall billboards punctuated the sky adjacent to I-95, and a Sunoco logo with an insistent arrow pointing down as if intentionally saying this is the place.

I would love to do a book of these images – a one day wonder – that documents this strange urban landscape off the beaten track where, somehow, the Trump campaign ended up. But I’ve already done two self-published books this year. Maybe I’ll do a Blurb book for me.

A few days after my impromptu trip to Philadelphia, I headed down to Richmond, Virginia. Since I was last there, the statues of J.E.B. Stuart, Stonewall Jackson, and Fontaine Maury have been removed from their pedestals, and the Jefferson Davis monument has been stripped of its commemorative plagues and the figure of Vindicatrix, representing the vindication of the Lost Cause, perched high on the central column, brought down. Robert E. Lee remains standing in legal limbo, and as result, continues to act as a magnet for political activities. Those behind the lawsuit to keep Lee on his pedestal are, unintentionally, maintaining the centrality of the transformed Lee statue as a symbol of Black Lives Matter and resistance to white supremacy.

In the meantime, I am pleased to announce that I have signed a contract with Circa Press, the publisher of my book, Atlantic City, to bring out Monument Avenue Richmond next fall. The book will include the new photographs of the empty pedestals.

It has been quite a year.