New York/Basketball

Tompkins Square Park basketball courts in 1980 (4×5) from Time and Space on the Lower East Side
© Brian Rose/Ed Fausty

Throughout the 80s and the early 90s I was regular at the pick-up basketball games on the courts near Avenue B and 10th Street in Tompkins Square Park. I played quite a bit on West 4th Street as well, the small cage-like court that still draws crowds of spectators today, but games there were hard to get into, and they often seemed more about the show than the game. The quality of play at Tompkins was pretty good in those years–lots of ex-high school stars and a few college castoffs. A couple of guys played pro in Europe for a while, and the NYU varsity team would sometimes show up together and challenge the neighborhood locals.

Games were typically played to 20 baskets, and you had to win by two with the winners staying on the court. Lots of close games would go on for an hour or more, so there was a heavy incentive to win, and as a result, games were played with great intensity. There’s still good street ball on the Lower East Side, but it has moved to Sarah D. Roosevelt Park, and the old courts in Tompkins are barely used.

Pat Cummings, former Knick center

One day in the early 90s, the Knick power forward Pat Cummings came down and joined one of our games. I’m not sure if he was retired from basketball at that point, or between teams. But he was still in shape, a solid 6’9″ body. Fortunately, one of our bigger guys was there that day, heavy set, but relatively agile at 6’7″. He and Cummings battled away under the basket, neither one backing down, or bailing out by taking long jumpers. Cummings was on my team, and though it was a competitive game, it definitely helped to have an NBA starter on my side. I remember playing really well, the recipient of several sharp passes from Cummings, and I was surprised by how well this notoriously slow-footed player moved up and down the court. I think we played two games and won both. Even though we were a bunch of playground wannabes he played with us without the least condescension.

I read sadly the other day that Pat Cummings died at 55–just a few years younger than I. Probably a heart attack or something equally sudden. He lived in the Village. I don’t know what he had been up to since retiring from the game, but my thoughts immediately went back to that afternoon in Tompkins Square Park. Here is Peter Vescey’s column in the Post.

Mike Barrett of the ABA Virginia Squires

Years earlier when I was 17, I had another opportunity to play with a professional basketball player, also memorable, but not a happy story. I was attending a summer basketball camp at a community college in Newport News, Virginia, and was thrilled to hear that my hero Mike Barrett of the Virginia Squires of the now defunct American Basketball Association, was making an appearance at the camp. Barrett was the slender shooting guard–about my height–on a terrific team that for a fleeting moment included Hall of Famers Rick Barry, George Gervin, and Julius Erving.

It was the last day of camp and the counselors and better high schoolers were playing a pick-up half court game. Mike Barrett took part and played on my team. I didn’t see exactly what happened, but suddenly Barrett stopped play clutching his hand. The game ended there, and a few days later it came out in the press that Barrett had broken his wrist and would likely miss a good part of the upcoming season. I was devastated. The injury, as I recall, did not heal easily, and Barrett did not play again for the Squires. He was later traded to San Diego where his career ended early in the season, apparently from another injury. In researching for this post, I discovered that Barrett died last year of cancer at age 67. All reports are that he was terrific guy.

Charleston Gazette article here.

 

New York/Interview

 

EV Grieve, the popular East Village based blog, has run an interview with me. It includes my thoughts about photographing the Lower East Side as well as my take on the neighborhood today.

From the interview:

People don’t understand that in 1980 the LES was hanging on by a thread, every night the sirens wailed as one more building was torched, one more life was snuffed out by drugs or murder. Yes, we saw ourselves as heroic artists scratching out songs and paintings against a backdrop of urban apocalypse — you can see it in the pictures — but that time is gone forever, for better or worse. As I write in “Time and Space,” the future is rushing in, reoccupying the old tenements, and transforming a place known more for the slow resonance of its history. Even my photographs from 2010 are beginning to look like artifacts of a time gone by.

New York/Photoville

Williamsburg, Brooklyn — © Brian Rose

 

Williamsburg, Brooklyn — © Brian Rose

 

Brooklyn Bridge Park — © Brian Rose

Photoville, a photo fair/expo located in a not yet finished section of Brooklyn Bridge Park is comprised of two main parts–printed images on vinyl running along a chain link fence, and a cluster of shipping containers that act as galleries. The containers in the photo above aren’t actually part of Photoville, but are nearby.

 

Photoville fence, photo by Timoth Fadek — © Brian Rose

The fence works well, facing west and getting full afternoon light. Many of the photographs chosen by a jury were excellent, and I was happy to see that each photographer was given a chance to show a series of images. The containers, however, were dark and uninviting in the extremely bright and warm sunshine. Even though it was relatively pleasant summer afternoon, the little village of containers and tents fairly baked under the sun.

 

Photoville fence, photos by Jeffrey Stockbridge — © Brian Rose

 

Photoville fence, photos by Peter Andrew Lusztyk —  © Brian Rose

 

Brooklyn Bridge Park — © Brian Rose

I could imagine an entire exhibition done with photographs printed on vinyl in different sizes mounted on lengths of chain link fencing. Something with a bit more visual dynamic given the visual drama just opposite, seen in the image above.

 

New York/Alex Harsley

Alex Harsley, self-portrait

I’ve written about Alex Harsley several times in this blog, a woefully overlooked photographer and icon of East 4th Street, where he maintains a gallery on the block pictured on the cover of Time and Space on the Lower East Side. Alex currently has a show up at the June Kelly gallery on Mercer Street, and a few days ago Holland Cotter gave it a review in the New York Times.

The exhibition at June Kelly surveys a half-century of Mr. Harsley’s own estimable art. Born in South Carolina in 1938 and a New York resident since childhood, he has made the city a primary subject of his classical brand of “street photography,” from shots of life in Harlem in the 1950s to velvety black-and-white images of downtown, late at night and silent, under snow in the 1990s.

 The gallery exhibition presents Harsley’s work as a 50 year retrospective, and while it does cover that period of time, it does not in any way offer a definitive overview of his life’s work. There are a number of reasons for why that is a difficult task to accomplish, which I will get to in a moment. Unfortunately, the show feels thin. It seems a grab bag  of notable images rather than a carefully selected  survey suggesting the depth of Harsley’s long career. Moreover, the print quality is all over the place, and the presentation is sloppy, the cheap metal  frames not meeting at the corners.

For many years, the best way to see Harsley’s work is to go to his gallery on East 4th Street where he hangs his work salon-style all over the walls, the unframed prints clothes pinned on string, and Alex himself present to answer questions, comment, or ramble on about the state of the world. If you stay long enough, he’ll coax you into the back room of his tiny tenement gallery where he works on his videos. I haven’t figured out what I think of these, yet, but this is what Alex has focused on over the past decade.

The Barnes Collection was recently transplanted from its original mansion setting on the edge of Philadelphia to a modern museum building on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, the rooms of Barnes’s crazily inspired world recreated precisely in the new more accessible location. As I walked through the Harsley exhibit at the June Kelly gallery with each picture presented in a line with generous space between, I missed the unruly interior of Alex’s salon back on 4th Street, and almost wished they had done a Barnes here, and moved the whole thing including Alex into the gallery.

That said, however, I think it’s high time that Alex Harsley’s photography be presented in a way that allows individual images to be appreciated, for the various threads of his work to be explored, and for him to assume his rightful place as an important contemporary photographer, and historically, one of the most important African American photographers. Holland Cotter in his New York Times review calls for “an institutional career survey” and writes further, “And surely the time has come to put a history of that career between the covers of a book.”

Malcolm X

Jean-Michel Basquiat

A rare color image

Part of the problem, surely, is that Harsley has made himself an outsider–sometimes willfully. But to a great extent it’s simply because he has never moved among the right circles of people, pushed the right buttons, never sought out the recognition that most others naturally chase after. His archive is, from what I can tell, a mess. There are undoubtedly thousands of negatives, and perhaps, dozens of great images never seen, never printed. I have no idea whether Alex would trust the work of sifting through his life’s work to a skilled researcher or curator, but I believe it needs to be done.

I cringed the other day seeing celebrity pictures of “A Life in Pictures, the Gordon Parks Centennial Gala” at the Museum of Modern Art. Parks, who died in 2006, is hailed as one of the great Black photographers of the 20th century. He worked for Life magazine, was a fashion photographer, documented the civil right movement, and made notable portraits of famous individuals. His work expresses the concept of photography as an instrument of social justice and projects images of human dignity and nobility. For me, however, Park’s images are often clichés of the type, as much about a certain accepted style as substance. He undoubtedly has his place in the history of magazine photography, but…

From Vogue magazine:

On the ground floor of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, at a gala celebrating the 100th anniversary of legendary African-American photographer, writer, and director Gordon Parks’s birthday, and honoring Alicia Keys, Annie Leibovitz, and HBO copresident, Richard Plepler, well-heeled guests mingled over cocktails and a series of silent-auction photographs while publicists yelled out the names of the A-list guests as they approached the red carpet. “Josh Groban‘s coming,” a girl hollered over the din, causing more than a few heads to turn toward the flurry of flashbulbs. “Josh Groban!” Despite the excitement, luminaries were not in short supply at the dinner, which boasted tables packed with names like Sarah Jessica Parker, cochair Karl Lagerfeld, Thelma Golden, and John Legend. The annual event, which raised $750,000 for The Gordon Parks Foundation, was kicked off by the evening’s host, Anderson Cooper, who recounted the life of Parks, who was born—one of fifteen children—in Kansas and rose in New York City, through hard work, to the top of his chosen field, becoming known for his photography for Life, Vogue, and many others, for directing films like Shaft, and for his humanitarian efforts. By the looks of the room, filled to capacity with his admirers and his photographs, it is a legacy well worth celebrating.

The photographic world of Alex Harsley intersects with that of Gordon Parks, but it a world portrayed in a drastically different way. He, too, photographed images that deal with racism, poverty, and even celebrity. But his images rarely strike that “family of man” chord that Parks played so well. In the image above, one of many Harsley nocturnal scenes, we are in the city, possibly the Lower East Side. The street is deserted, bedecked in steadily falling snow. A police car idles, lights on. A couple of individuals approach in the distance. There is no conventional meaning here. It is a moment of hushed solitude, of uneasy anticipation, composed without artifice, presented without statement. Only clarity of vision.
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New York/Recent Press

 

I’ve been gett a lot of press since releasing Time and Space on the Lower East Side a few weeks ago. A number of blogs have posted articles or galleries, but this is the first article from what is referred to (sometimes disparagingly) as the mainstream media. It’s a nice article, available online, as well as getting generous space in the Saturday print edition of the paper.

 

The Local: East Village is a blog affiliated with the New York Times and NYU’s journalism school. They did a story last year about my World Trade Center mural on East 4th Street. This presentation is a particularly good integration of text and photos.

New York/Brooklyn Museum

The Brooklyn Museum

In the lobby of the Brooklyn Museum on my way to the Keith Haring exhibition.

Keith Haring 1978-1982, the Brooklyn Museum — © Brian Rose

As well known as Haring is–certainly everyone has seen his highly graphic images even if only in a commercial context–but until now there hasn’t been a more serious assessment of his work. There’s always a danger when the established art world takes on a street artist by putting the work into a conventional gallery context. Haring was best seen in situ–in the wild. But that was 30 years ago, around the same time I was taking my early photographs of the Lower East Side. Since then, we have mostly experienced Haring on t-shirts and tote bags.

Keith Haring 1978-1982, the Brooklyn Museum — © Brian Rose

 This exhibition does two things–it documents through photographs, slides, and video how Haring worked and interacted with the art and music scene of the time, and it presents his work in the broader context of late 20th century art. Although he reused the same graphic elements frequently, this exhibit shows Haring to be a far more complex artist than previously assumed. He was just getting started when he was cut down by AIDS in 1989.

Keith Haring 1978-1982, the Brooklyn Museum — © Brian Rose

For me, however, Haring’s was at his best at his simplest and most spontaneous–the white chalk drawings on black paper that he did throughout the New York subway system. Back then, when ads were replaced, black paper with a toothy matte surface temporarily filled the billboard frames on the subway platforms providing an enticing canvas for Haring. I saw him once in the Bleecker Street station of the #6 train (the old IRT) sketching alone, moving rapidly from one black frame to another.

It’s not ideal putting them behind reflective plexi in the museum–though I’m sure they are fragile and have to protected. I don’t know how many actually survived, but you can see images of dozens of them– 35mm slide documents of the originals–in an adjacent gallery.

I always liked Haring’s imagery, but tended to dismiss it as commercial fluff, though I understood its relationship to earlier Pop Art. He was both commercial and an artist of substance. This exhibit helps set the record straight.

 

New York/Little Italy

Alex Harsley, Clic Bookstore and Gallery — © Brian Rose

I only took one photo during the book launch for Time and Space on the Lower East Side, and that one at the very beginning. The rest of the time I was occupied. Alex Harsley of the 4th Street Photo Gallery was an early arrival, and behind him is Alexandra Uzik–not sure how she ended up there–who took some pictures for her blog.

After the crush last week mailing out over a hundred books–mostly to my Kickstarter backers–and doing all the legwork to prepare for the book launch, I am happily relaxing this Memorial Day weekend.

New York/Lower East Side

St. Mary’s Church, Grand Street — © Brian Rose

Wednesday’s book launch was a big success. Over 100 people came to Clic Bookstore and Gallery–some old friends, my publisher Bill Diodato, and lots of people I was meeting for the first time–even a few of the ubiquitous moochers who took advantage of the beautiful catering provided by Downtown Kitchen. My 13 year old son arrived from a school baseball game wearing his uniform, a nice touch. My mother-in-law, An, from Amsterdam had flown in and was doing the town, staying in the new and hyper-chic Wythe Hotel in Williamsburg.

Most of the week was spent mailing out books to my Kickstarter backers and to those who had pre-ordered books from my website–more than a 100 books. My assistant Chris Gallagher and I made numerous trips back and forth to the post office, the mini-storage where the books are kept, and my studio on Stanton Street just off the Bowery. I am happy to announce that all of the Kickstarter books are now in the mail. We also began delivering books to stores around Manhattan.

A partial list of stores where Time and Space on the Lower East Side can be bought:

St. Mark’s Bookshop, Strand Bookstore, McNally Jackson, Dashwood Books, the New Museum, ICP, NYU Bookstore, the Museum of the City of New York, and the powerHouse Arena in Brooklyn. Although I do best when books are ordered on my website, it would be nice to see people support their local bookstores. We are extremely fortunate here in New York to have such a large number of wonderful shops.

And that’s where this largely DIY publishing venture now stands. I need to sell 1,000 books to break even. I am doing everything I can to publicize Time and Space, but much depends on word of mouth. I believe that Time and Space is a classic photo book, and one of the few like it focused on New York City. Your support is greatly appreciated.

New York/Time and Space Review

Review in Conscientious

From Joerg Colberg’s review in his highly respected blog Conscientious:

Anyway, what you can take away from Time and Space on the Lower East Side is that its maker really loves the city and, of course, that he is a very good photographer. The images all were done with a large-format camera, so they offer a carefully constructed frame that might or might not be filled with a lot of life and details. It’s not necessarily a New York I’ve seen too often in photographs, and I really enjoy looking at the combination of cityscapes, street scenes, and details. Various of the spreads pair the same or very similar setting thirty years apart – things have changed, and they haven’t.

Maybe all that talk about money really is just surface, and underneath, New York – or at least Manhattan’s Lower East Side – simply is what it has always been: A pretty great, unique place.

Read the whole thing here.