From inside crown of the Statue of Liberty (digital) — © Brian Rose

Statue of Liberty still held hostage by militant insurgents in Congress.

Statue of Liberty (digital) — © Brian Rose

Closed due to (attempted) coup d’état.

Museum of Modern Art — © Brian Rose

Way back when — the late 70s — I studied with Hans Haacke, the distinguished political/conceptual artist. Although I did not go in that direction as a photographer, it was an important experience for me, and I have believed ever sense, that art should be grounded in historical and political context, that it needs to interact dialectically with the world we live in. This process, to me, does not necessarily resolve the questions surrounding truth and beauty, but it exposes or illuminates the language — visual or textual — that we use when we talk about these ineffable things.

Does this make sense to you? Maybe, maybe not. It’s a little dangerous going down this road, especially a road so well-trodden and rutted as to be, perhaps, irrelevant.

In New Photography 2013 at the Museum of Modern Art we get to go down this and other well-worn paths concerning conceptual/polemical photography. Curator Roxana Marcoci asserts that “there has never been just one type of photography,” as if throwing down a gauntlet. Her show presents a group of photographers who “have redefined photography as a medium of experimentation and intellectual inquiry.” In this show it is not enough to focus attention on individual artists who are attempting to stake out some small scrap of new turf in an already expansive field. No, they must be doing something truly ground breaking, “creatively reassessing the meaning of image-makingtoday.”

Museum of Modern Art text panel

Please read the text panel above. It is, of course, not necessary or desirable to actually see the photographs. The meaning is in the text. Were one to encounter the above guinea pig portraits unburdened of their meaning, one might miss the “historical links to the slave trade,” and one might gaze in bafflement at the “ribbon, string, and Mylar” intended to animate the “deadpan expressions” of these furry rodents.

One might, in all likelihood, not care one way or another about any of these photographs, and move on to other, hopefully more trenchant, examples of social and aesthetic engagement. Say, for instance, the Walker Evans “American Photographs” upstairs in the museum, which still look pretty new 75 years after they were made.

I believe this is one of those moments characterized by the expression “jumping the shark.” In this case guinea pigs.

Kent Avenue and N10th, Williamsburg, Brooklyn (digital) — © Brian Rose

Without comment.

Tribute in Light 2013 (digital) — © Brian Rose

I was up in the Bronx photographing a Fordham University office space. After that I headed down to Brooklyn with my assistant Chris Gallagher. I wanted to get an image of the Tribute in Light — two focused beams of light symbolic of the Twin Towers.

I’d been thinking of a good location for a while, and decided upon the park just above the Brooklyn Bridge near Jane’s Carrousel. We walked around for about an hour looking for a good spot. The area was swarming with photographers carrying everything from iPhones to zoom lensed SLRs. Unsurprisingly, I appeared to be the only person with a view camera.

I found my vantage point — at a safe distance from the shutterbugs — and alternated shooting with 4×5 film and the Canon 5D Mark III (for those interested in such things) that I’d been using for my earlier architectural shoot. The image above was made with the latter.

It was an exceedingly warm, muggy, and windless night. But good for long exposures with the view camera. Dozens of people took up stations nearby awaiting the lights. As it got darker I became aware of the amber glow from a nearby streetlight being thrown on my foreground. The result has a strange theatricality, almost like the different elements were pasted together.

I’m picking up the 4×5 film later in the day. It will be interesting to compare to the digital image..

Without comment.

East 4th Street — © Brian Rose (digital)

Without comment.

Bettery Magazine interview

This is an interview with me and my wife Renee Schoonbeek. First time, I think, we’ve been featured together. Bettery Magazine is an initiative of smart, the car company.

Here’s what it says on their “about” page:

Bettery Magazine is an online publication featuring the people, places and ideas that are changing our urban landscapes today. In giving their unique foresights an international stage, Bettery Magazine aims to encourage the creative thinking poised to reshape and revitalize cities around the globe.

Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven (digital) — © Brian Rose

Without comment.

On the street with a print from a 1985 image. (digital) — © Brian Rose

Everyone thinks I should do it, so I am working on a series of before/after images of the Meatpacking District. I originally photographed the area in 1985, also venturing uptown into west Chelsea. I had completed the Lower East Side project — which I later came back to — and I had finished photographing the Financial District — with an NEA grant. I had also begun photographing various NYC parks, and later that year I would begin my travels along the Iron Curtain border across Europe. But for a week or so in late winter of 1985 I wandered around the west side of Manhattan and documented the profoundly empty streets, like a stage set with the actors on break. Eventually, as we all know, the people would come.

Gansevoort Street 1985 (4×5 negative) — © Brian Rose

Gansevoort Street 2013 (4×5 negative) — © Brian Rose

My experience with photographing New York, however, does not always follow the usual expectations about then and now. And with the Time and Space on the Lower East Side I deliberately wanted to challenge preconceived notions about what change actually looks like on the streets of the city.

New York, even the relatively glittering canyons of Manhattan, remains an often gritty place. The Meatpacking District has become a center of fashion and art, but like Soho before it, it continues to show its utilitarian roots, and is still dominated by late 19th and early 20th century architecture. The Gansevoort Market is still in business under the High Line housing a number of meat purveyors. In the view above of Gansevoort Street, one has to look twice to see the changes. Florent, the famous restaurant from ’80s is gone, and another restaurant has taken its place. The storefront of the small reddish building is now a boutique, but much of the block remains empty — as a Maserati rumbles along the cobblestones.

Gansevoort Street 2013 (4×5 negative) — © Brian Rose

As is often the case, “after” photographs can be less compelling than “befores.” The factors that led to the first image being made, are no longer present. These can be very subtle attributes, atmospheric, ineffable. So, part of my strategy in rephotographing the Meatpacking District is to look for new pictures, or variations on the originals.  The image directly above was made a few minutes after repeating the 1985 picture. It is, perhaps, a better description of the block with the Standard Hotel looming in the background.

Washington Street 1985 (4×5 negative) — © Brian Rose

Washington Street 2013 (digital) — © Brian Rose

Washington Street 1985 (4×5 negative) — © Brian Rose

Washington Street 2013 (digital) — © Brian Rose

I am shooting the new photographs in 4×5 film using a similar camera and lens as in 1985, but then scanning the negatives and working up the images in Photoshop. Some of the images here were taken with my point-and-shoot, which I usually have with me while working with the big camera. As the film gets processed and the images completed, I will replace the digital snaps with the final 4×5 photos.

Washington Street 1985 (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose

Washington Street 2013 (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose

Washington Street 1985 (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose

Washington Street 2013 (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose

In a previous post, I wrote about this being the former location of the Mineshaft, an infamous men’s sex club closed at the height of the AIDS crisis just a few months after my photograph was taken in 1985. Now, other sybaritic delights beckon.

West 14th Street 1985 (4×5 negative) — © Brian Rose

West 14th Street 2013 (4×5 negative) — © Brian Rose

The images above are both 4x5s. I made several pictures with the 14th Street Apple store clearly visible on the right, but stepping a few feet forward better duplicated the original image.

Hudson and 14th Street 1985 (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose

Hudson and 14th Street 2013 (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose

Little West 12th Street and West Street 1985 (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose

Little West 12th Street and West Street 2013 (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose

Pier 54 2013 (digital) — © Brian Rose

When I photographed the area in 1985, Pier 54 was an enclosed building as seen above. At present, only the steel structure of the facade remains. Occasionally the the otherwise empty pier is used for events. A small part of it is open to the public, and while I was there a couple of female skateboarders zoomed about while bicycles and joggers streamed along West Street.

Stay tuned for more pictures.

Fire Island — © Brian Rose

Without comment.

From the article What Bookstores Buy: St. Mark’s Bookshop in New York City:

St. Mark’s Bookshop has been located in Manhattan’s East Village for 35 years, first on St. Mark’s Place and now on 3rd Avenue. Co-owner Bob Contant, who purchases a variety of genres for the store, including photography and art books, says their customers reflect the diversity of New York City…

Consignment is also how the store handles self-published books. One recent example of a self-published photo book that was popular at St. Mark’s Bookshop is Time and Space on the Lower East Side by Brian Rose. The book compares photos Rose made in 1980 and 2010 at specific locations on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The photographer himself brought it to the store to ask that they sell it. Contant notes that it’s a good example of the type of photo books that do well in the store: “It’s a combination of subject matter and the fact that it’s sort of a historical document.”

The photo and caption above is from the August print edition of PDN.

Meatpacking District window — © Brian Rose

Without comment.

The Rijksmuseum seen through “iamsterdam” promotional sculpture — © Brian Rose

After almost two weeks of superb weather on Texel, the North Sea Dutch island, we headed for Amsterdam for two days before returning to New York. For many years, both the Rijksmuseum and the Stedelijk Museum have been undergoing extensive renovations and were closed. Imagine if the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern Art were closed at the same time for the better part of a decade. This was not a good thing for a city trying to promote itself as a cultural capital — well, at least they had Van Gogh. But the good news is that both museums have reopened.

New entry courtyard in Rijksmuseum — © Brian Rose

The Rijksmuseum desperately needed upgrading. It occupied a decorative 19th century building by Pierre Cuypers, in the same style as his Central Station at the foot of the Damrak. It was a worthy home for the superb collection of Rembrandts and Vermeers, among others, but it was hopelessly outmoded as a contemporary museum, and could scarcely handle the ever increasing hordes of tourists hell bent on seeing the Nightwatch and checking it off on their to do list.

The reconstruction of the museum was delayed for years by a controversy involving bicycles — I kid you not. For decades one of the main bike routes through the center of the city passed directly through a passage in the Rijksmuseum. When the architects of the renovation proposed rerouting the bikes, they were met by the fury of the Amsterdam bicycle lobby, a group comparable in power to the military industrial complex in the United States. The solution was elegant — tunneling under the passage — but cost time and an ungodly amount of money. In the photo above, you can see visitors entering the museum through one of the impressive glass enclosed courtyards created by the Spanish firm Cruz y Ortiz Arquitectos.

Rembrandt’s Nightwatch — © Brian Rose

Once inside, the galleries have been beautifully refurbished by French interior architect Jean-Michel Wilmotte. The art mobs gravitate to Rembrandt’s Nightwatch — seen above — and press in relentlessly to see the relatively tiny Vermeers. But the museum is pretty big, so there are lots of galleries that are not crowded.

Jocob Saenredam — © Brian Rose

Here I am looking at one Saenredam’s architectural paintings made as if he were using a view camera.

Jacob Ruisdael — © Brian Rose

And Ruisdael, who in this painting framed the endlessly horizontal Dutch landscape near Haarlem with a near square, the sky taking up 3/4 of the composition.

The Stedelijk Museum seen from Museumplein — © Brian Rose

The first time I visited Amsterdam was in 1985 when I was just beginning my photographic journeys along the former Iron Curtain. The Stedelijk made a major impression on me in that it presented a view of modern art history that differed greatly from the linear narrative of MoMA in New York. It was all over the map, and challenged the idea that art develops as some kind of grand procession, one thing leading to the next, as if it were all inevitable. That said, I’ve come to appreciate the Modern’s effort to organize and make sense of things chronologically and stylistically.

Unlike MoMA, which was housed in a modernist collection of buildings, the Stedelijk was confined to a 19th century art palace with a grand staircase and comfortable, but inflexible, galleries. Like the Rijksmuseum nearby, it had inadequate accommodation for large crowds of visitors and little space for a shop and cafe. With one of the best collections of modern art in the world, it was obvious that something needed to be done.

The Stedelijk Museum from the Van Baerlestraat — © Brian Rose

And here begins a sad tale of political and organizational dysfunction terminating in the “the bathtub” seen above in my quickly stitched together panorama. Read Michael Kimmelman’s Times article for the full story. The new wing of the museum faces the Museumplein, a desultory sward of grass punctuated by paved vectors and shapes, including the infamous “donkey’s ear,” a peeled up corner of the park serving as the entrance to underground parking and an Albert Heijn supermarket —  the perfect location for groceries — smack dab between the stately Concertgebouw concert hall and the Stedelijk.

The new wing is mostly diffuse empty space, which will allow the museum to mount the kind of installation art now in favor around the globe. Such an installation was on view in the enormous basement space — a windowless art dungeon — where multiple videos by Aernout Mik were on display set among an intentionally disorienting maze of passageways and spaces. The show was appropriately sponsored by Ahold, the company that owns the Albert Heijn supermarket just out the front door of the museum. See Times review of Mik’s work here.

There are lots of wonderful things to see in the Stedelijk, regardless of the new building. But after everything, the architectural confection of the Rijksmuseum and the empty calories of the Stedelijk, all the hundreds of millions of dollars, coming back home to New York, the one thing that made the most impression on me, was that little Ruisdael painting, just over a foot square, sunlight breaking through the clouds.

Den Hoorn, Texel, The Netherlands — © Brian Rose

The weather has been exceptionally good, but in the evenings, fog sometimes rolls in off the sea. I made this image with the 4×5 camera as well.

Texel, the Netherlands — © Brian Rose

I am in the Netherlands with my family on vacation. Yesterday evening I went out with my view camera and did a series of photographs of a small grove trees in the dunes along the coast of Texel, an island on the North Sea. Picture above made with my digital camera sitting on top of the view camera.

The Statue of Liberty (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose

Without comment.

Liberty Island, superintendent’s house (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose

Liberty Island, superintendent’s house (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose

After finishing with photography of the Statue of Liberty a couple of weeks ago, I set up my view camera and walked around the perimeter of the island. I was looking, in particular, for views of 1 World Trade Center that might go in my upcoming book WTC. One of the peculiarities of being on Liberty Island is that you can’t get back far enough from the statue to really see it well, and getting it and the skyline of New York together isn’t possible. But I found several views toward the city quite compelling nevertheless.

Two of them were in and around the superintendent’s house on the back side of Liberty Island. Renovation work on the Statue of Liberty was actually complete last October, and the island opened for visitors. For one day. Hurricane Sandy hit New York on October 29th flooding Liberty Island, knocking out power to the statue, and damaging various infrastructure and support buildings, including the superintendent’s house. The cleanup took months, and the statue was just reopened on July 4th.

My understanding is that the house will be torn down — it is part of a small complex of buildings of little architectural or historic importance. I found the house just beyond the contractor’s trailers sitting abandoned and exposed to the elements. I did one picture in front looking toward Lower Manhattan, and another in the living room looking toward a picture window framing a view of the skyline, a ruined piano and couch in the foreground.

Reminders of the vulnerability of New York, natural or otherwise.