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.

View of skyline from Liberty Island (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose

Two weeks ago, I photographed the Statue of Liberty on assignment. It was a two-day shoot focused on improvements made to visitor circulation inside the statue’s pedestal, and various other infrastructural upgrades that will be mostly invisible to the public. Liberty Island was a beehive of activity as construction workers sped to complete renovations in time for the July 4th reopening.

At the end of the second day of photography, I got out my view camera and made a number of images looking toward the city and 1 World Trade Center. By 4pm, most of the construction workers had left, and I had the island, more or less, to myself.

The sun, blazing most of the day, became partly obscured by clouds producing a more muted palette — something that suits me fine. Although I use a digital camera for architectural shoots, I still work with the big camera for my own work. Switching cameras was a relief. I slowed down, found a groove, and made several images that I think are potential keepers.

Bond Street — © Brian Rose

Houston Street — © Brian Rose

11th Avenue in Chelsea — © Brian Rose

Sixth Avenue and 16th Street — © Brian Rose

Random coming and going around Manhattan. Would a real New Yorker step foot in Houston Hall?

No.

San Francisco courtyard — © Brian Rose

A brief trip to San Francisco for my sister’s wedding. Her new husband is Andrew Barnett, the noted coffee expert who, soon, is opening a cafe in the Mission. Cathy and Andrew were married in City Hall just as the first same-sex weddings began after last weeks’s historic Supreme Court decision. There was a buzz of anticipation in City Hall as new officiating trainees were brought in to handle the coming overflow.

We stayed in architect David Baker’s place, also in the Mission. The weather was incredible. Sunlight flames in the courtyard.

Inside the crown — © Any Warren

Temporarily took down my Statue of Liberty photos, but hope to have them up again soon. They look great, and I had a wonderful two days in and around the monument. Sorry for the interruption. Stay tuned.

Brian

Kent Avenue — © Brian Rose

Bedford Avenue — © Brian Rose

Without comment.

Join me for the opening of The Yard, a new co-working space on the Lower East Side. I will be showing a large portion of the work exhibited in March at Dillon Gallery. If you missed the show at Dillon, this is your second chance. The 4×5 foot prints look spectacular. I’ll be there with books to sign.

The Yard is located on the corner directly opposite the Tenement Museum shop, and across Delancey Street from the corner that I photographed in 1980 and 2010. Hope to see you there.

Trapeze School, Pier 40 — © Brian Rose

Yesterday, I took my view camera to Pier 40, the former passenger ship dock at the western end of Houston Street. The pier is now being used as a sports facility, and I’ve been there many times for my son’s baseball games. On the roof of the building there is a soccer field and a trapeze school. I’ve had my eye on the roof for some time for a photograph of One World Trade Center, which is nearing completion, and rises impressively in the background. I am currently looking for shots of the tower to complete my book WTC, which I plan to publish next year.

It was a beautiful warm afternoon and I arrived around 6:30, setting up my camera just inside the gate, and doing a series of pictures over the course of 45 minutes. The staff was very friendly, and I appreciate their allowing access to the space. What I wanted was a shot looking downtown with the trapeze apparatus in the foreground, preferably with someone in the air to the left. Everything came together nicely. The photo above was made with my pocket camera placed directly on top of the view camera. So, just about the same shot. The view camera exposures were probably a bit longer (1/60th of a second at f16.5), so we’ll see later how much the figures on the trapeze are blurred.

This could make a good closing image for the book.

Orchard Street — © Brian Rose

Without comment.

Step Down, Cooper Union, with student leader Victoria Sobel seated on floor
© Brian Rose

Art school, protest, and how I got to Cooper Union

Before transferring to Cooper Union in 1977 I was attending MICA (Maryland Institute College of Art). It was an expensive private art school — tuition is now just over $39,000 per year. I remember the college president telling the incoming class in a welcoming speech what percentage of students would complete their degrees and go on to find careers in art. It was a discouragingly low number.

Previously, I had studied urban planning and architecture at the University of Virginia, and art school was difficult step for me. But my interest in photography had blossomed, and I saw myself becoming a fine art photographer down the road. At first, the diverse course offerings for obtaining a BFA were daunting — I hadn’t done any drawing or painting before — but I became increasingly appreciative of the interconnectedness of the different media, and as I became more confident in my abilities, I began to evaluate the students around me as well as the quality of the professors I was studying with.

It was a mixed bag. Many of the students seemed more enamored of the art lifestyle than the actual practice of art. And many of the professors, especially the entrenched tenured ones, seemed to be coasting as artists. There seemed a lack of ambitiousness all round. A large faculty art show in the college gallery confirmed my suspicions. The work was weak and directionless, and to me, it was insulting to those of us paying a ton of money to attend the school. So, a friend of mine and I engaged in a little guerrilla action, creating a flyer printed in black courier type that panned the faculty show and suggested that our tuition money was going to waste. We taped these flyers up everywhere on the campus — on walls, doors, in classrooms, restrooms, inside drawers and underneath desks. It caused quite a sensation.

I should say here, however, that some of my motivation was simply unearned hubris, and that some of my professors were excellent. Furthermore, not knowing what things are like at MICA in these days, this should not be construed as criticism of the present school. However, I was right about needing a more challenging environment, and as a result, began looking into exchange programs with other art schools. Above all, I wanted to explore color photography. It was 1976, and color was just becoming a viable medium outside of advertising and magazines, and seeing that Joel Meyerowitz, one of the pioneers of color photography was teaching at Cooper Union, I knew where I should go. I did my one semester exchange, hung around unofficially for another semester auditing classes, using my student ID good for a year, and eventually got in as a transfer student. The dean of the art school later told me they accepted four out of 450 applicants for transfer that year.

It had to be Cooper. My parents had pretty much given up on me and my educational wanderings, and had cut off my funding. Cooper, of course, was tuition free, making it possible for me to continue my dream even without parental support. A full telling of the story would describe in detail how life-changing the experience of attending Cooper was. How terrific the teachers were. How brilliant the students were. How it was understood without questioning that we were artists, and would go on to be artists in the real world, in New York City just outside the door, our campus and hometown. And that’s what happened for me. I was able to immediately begin an extended photography project upon graduation, and have been pursuing my dream for 30 years since.

Art School, protest, and (the end?) of Cooper Union

On Saturday I attended both Show Up, the annual end-of-year student show at Cooper Union, and Step Down, the renegade art show on the 7th floor of the Foundation Building just outside the office of Jamshed Bharucha, the college president. As those of you following the news already know, the president’s office has been occupied by students demanding that he and the chairman of the board of trustees resign. The sit-in was precipitated by the decision to begin charging tuition to close a budget gap brought on by financial mismanagement and the lack of imagination and leadership required to fix the problem. This alteration of Cooper’s central mission of providing free education to all, regardless of economic status, threatens to destroy the egalitarian meritocracy that has made this place a unique treasure.

Step Down is an openly polemical show full of anger and biting humor. The work was provided by students, alumni, and friends. I donated my book Time and Space on the Lower East Side with a letter to the students who are leading the effort to save Cooper Union. The letter explains that Time and Space would not have happened without Cooper, and that it reconnects, for me, the gap between the present and that time when I first arrived in New York City. The student protest at Cooper goes far beyond my modest flyer of 1976, but both actions, on different levels, are about the quality and the value of education.

The book is displayed on a table, and you can read my letter below. (Click on the letter for an easier to read view)

Time and Space on the Lower East Side at Step Down — © Brian Rose

Letter accompanying my book at Step Down 

Step Down, Cooper Union — © Brian Rose

The art blog Hyperallergic wrote about Step Down:

…the exhibition Free Cooper Union put together, in only a week’s time, is probably one of the most significant and symbolic shows of the year. …this is an important exhibition, singular in capturing a raw provocation to authority. It’s an endeavor as worthwhile as it is rare.

And another article from ArtInfo.
More photos of Step Down here.

The New Academic Building, Cooper Union — © Brian Rose

As I was leaving the 7th floor, I pointed my camera out the window and made the photograph above across Cooper Square. Normally, when a university constructs a major new building it gets named for a prominent donor who helped make it possible. At Cooper the NAB, or New Academic Building, is a grand architectural statement bereft of a benefactor’s name. A large part of Cooper Union’s financial woes are connected to that fact. It was a complex real estate deal so they say, but, in a nutshell, the trustees chose to borrow the entire cost of construction, and now find they are unable to make the mortgage payments. As a result, they have shifted the debt to the students and abandoned the mission as expressed by Peter Cooper that education should be as “free as water and air.”

East River and Brooklyn Navy Yard — © Brian Rose

Now that I am no longer using the 4×5 for architectural shoots — it’s hard to believe that era is over — I have switched completely to a field view camera for my personal projects. I’m using an inexpensive Toyo made largely of plastic (blech) but it’s super lightweight. Way lighter than the Arca Swiss monorail camera I was using for architecture.

I went out with the view camera yesterday morning. At 8:30am it was already getting hot, and the sky, while clear, was a bit hazy. I walked along the Brooklyn waterfront looking for distant views of One World Trade Center for my upcoming book, WTC. A few days ago, driving by, I saw some prefab housing units standing near Kent Avenue with the skyline looming behind. It didn’t seem quite so looming when I got there, but I did several photographs. For one picture I stepped a couple of feet beyond the open gate into the Brooklyn Navy Yard. A guard stationed about 200 feet away checking cars entering the yard immediately began yelling and blowing a whistle as if I had done something horribly wrong. For those of you outside of New York, this is no longer the Navy. It’s an industrial compound that hosts numerous businesses large and small. There are all kinds of innovative things going on in there.

Anyway, I ignored the guard who was stuck in his little booth, took my picture, and walked away. From there I walked by 475 Kent, a controversial loft building full of artists that has been on the legal razor’s edge for work/live spaces for some time. I don’t know anything about its current status. But a resident coming out suggested I go up to the roof. So, up I went. I did two side by side views that may be combined for a panorama later. The right hand frame can be seen above, although that’s from my digital point and shoot, not the 4×5.

Fillmore Place and Roebling — © Brian Rose

Grand Street — © Brian Rose

Havemeyer Street — © Brian Rose

Random images in Williamsburg, Brooklyn

Time and Space on display at the Tenement Museum Store — © Brian Rose

It has been one year since Time and Space on the Lower East Side was published, and over 800 of approximately 1,100 books have been sold — well on the way to selling out. At the moment, I have no plans to go to a second printing. So, the first edition is undoubtedly something worth collecting. You can always go to my website to purchase, or to one of the independent booksellers in Manhattan like the Tenement Museum store above. I am now shifting gears to working on a new book, WTC, partnering again with Bill Diodato of Golden Section Publishers. This book will focus on the skyline of New York, principally the Twin Towers and their replacement One World Trade Center, and includes pictures from 1978 to the present.

I found this recently — the blog I Fear Brooklyn. Bob Hill, who keeps the blog wrote a short but wonderful encomium to Time and Space on the Lower East Side. Hill writes:

…Time & Space presents the New York that we talk about when we talk about New York. The beauty of this exhibition being Brian Rose set out again a few short years ago, this time to document the same East Side a full three decades now removed. If anything, these photos serve as a reminder that the more things change, the more they stay the same. But they also leave a sense of setting out again at twilight, if not the very awkward feeling it’s much later than you know.

Of all the things written about Time and Space, this is my favorite.

Richmond Terrace, Staten Island (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose

A few weeks ago I took my view camera down to Staten Island to rephotograph a mural that I encountered last year. It’s on the side of an old factory building that now contains Gerardi’s Farmer’s Market. The central element is a depiction of three firemen hoisting an American flag Iwo Jima style in the rubble of the destroyed Twin Towers, which is based on a widely seen news photo taken by Thomas E. Franklin.

Almost 12 years after 9/11, the painting has begun to fade and flake off, the Twin Towers have become faint and indistinct. I photographed the mural from several angles and settled on the one above taken across the street in a garden center. Although the 9/11 museum has yet to open at ground zero, and memories of that day remain fresh for many, the images of 9/11 have begun to recede into the background.

Staten Island Yankees stadium (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose

On my way back to ferry I saw that a high school baseball game was being played in the Staten Island Yankee’s stadium. Admission was free, so I walked in and took a couple of pictures. The Staten Island memorial can be seen at left with its two wing-like structures, and One World Trade Center rises at center. On top of the scoreboard is a cutout image of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge.

Broadway — © Brian Rose

Yoko Ono’s campaign against tracking.