New York/Lower East Side

Orchard Street 1909

Throughout working on my Lower East Side project, I have been aware of the rich photographic history attached to the neighborhood. Turn of the century photographers like Lewis Hine and Jacob Riis established the image of the LES as a place of hardship and corruption in need of social reform. Later, Berenice Abbot photographed the streetscape and architecture while Helen Levitt focused on life in the streets. Rebecca Lepkoff  vividly, if somewhat sentimentally, chronicled Jewish culture, and Nan Goldin revealed the interior lives of a generation of  artists and musicians. There are many others who have contributed to this history in myriad ways.

But the dominant visual icon of the Lower East Side has always been similar to the photo above: a teaming street full of pushcarts and wayward children, a solid wall of tenements receding into the distance hung with fire escapes and signage, a vibrant scene of urban life, however physically poor and begrimed. This photograph comes from the Detroit Publishing Company by way of the blog Shorpy, one of my favorite places to visit on the internet, which features high resolution historic photographs found in the public domain.

Orchard Street 1980 — © Brian Rose/Ed Fausty

The picture above that Ed Fausty and I did in 1980 strongly echoes the 1909 image. It’s the same corner except looking the opposite direction taken on a Sunday when Orchard is closed to vehicular traffic. I was aware of the homage when we took it, though I doubt that I had seen the exact picture shown above. There are a number of others, not much different. On the one hand, I was obsessed with doing something new, using color film to create a portrait of a place in a way not seen before. On the other hand, I wanted to connect to the history of photography, especially as it pertained to the Lower East Side itself. This image of Orchard Street, as much as any in my new book Time and Space on the Lower East Side, is a bridge to that past.

Last night I unveiled Time and Space at the Duo Theater on East 4th Street. There were about 80 people there, a full house, and I was pleased to see some familiar faces, some of whom were surprises. I noticed there was a contingent of Kickstarter backers, the people who helped raise the money to do the book. My publisher, Bill Diodato was there, and I was especially happy to see Alex Harsley, photographer and host of the 4th Street Photo Gallery, whom Time and Space is dedicated to.

Here is a snippet of video from the evening off of an iPhone:

New York/East Harlem

Park Avenue — © Brian Rose

A short walk between the 103rd Street subway entrance and the Museum of the City of New York. After the economic downtown of a few years ago, the neighborhood seems to be  gentrifying at a fast pace. On Lexington Avenue there is new apartment building nearing completion, and a cafe catering to an middle class clientele stands next to bodegas and nail salons. But like the Lower East Side, it’s an uneven phenomenon with plenty of vacant lots and run down buildings still present. And the housing projects continue to loom over everything.

Park Avenue — © Brian Rose

East 104th Street — © Brian Rose

East 104th Street — © Brian Rose

New York/Hell’s Kitchen

DeWitt Clinton Park, West 52nd Street — © Brian Rose

From the New York Times, February 5, 2012:

“Think of layers of wax that are just squeezed,” Mr. Horenstein said. “Even when it’s weathered, you can see all those convolutions.” The marvels continued, as a granitic substance filled in the cracks after the deformation, creating delicate traceries. Retreating glacial ice finally gave the whole thing a terrific polish that endures to this day.

 

New York/Two Portraits

 

Lucille Ball, 1944, Harry Warnecke

This photograph of Lucille Ball made in 1944 by Harry Warnecke jumped out at me this morning while thumbing through the New York Times. It’s part of an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. Like most people, I think of “Lucy” in comedic settings, exaggerated facial expressions, slapstick, wonderful goofball humor. I don’t know the context of this photo shoot, but it’s clearly a carefully set up studio portrait. Makeup is perfect, a magnificently  colorful skirt overflowing in the foreground, she seems to be sitting on a stool with her legs to the side, one over the other, her left elbow resting just above her knee. It’s’ a relaxed pose, but slightly awkward at the same time. Her famous red hair is topped with an even redder headpiece, a flimsy scrim of red fabric framing her face. But there is scarcely a hint of the clownish Lucille Ball of a few years later.

Neil Genzlinger in the Times thinks she looks a little sad, and I agree, possibly. One expects Hollywood stars to project more personality, however forced. But here Lucy appears pensive, perhaps tired. Is she waiting for something? Is it a moment of boredom in the course of series of more typical mugging for the camera? She almost seems to be saying, all right, I’m ready, let’s do the next shot.  Despite all the formal portrait artifice at play, this appears an unguarded moment, a moment expressive of her unadorned self, and more naturally beautiful than ever. Warnecke didn’t do anything at that moment but click.

Of course this is all speculation. We’ll never know what was going on during that shoot, what was in her thoughts. But the enigmatic quality of that image is what brings me back to photography again and again, why I never tire of it, and why I continue to be fascinated  by the world as it presents itself to me.

 

Untitled, 2008, Cindy Sherman

The big show in town right now is Cindy Sherman at the Museum of Modern Art. She is, as the website text states, “widely recognized as one of the most important and influential artists in contemporary art.” Note, art, not photography. We are all artists, of course, but some of us, the ones who utilize photography, are more artists than others.  The curators and gallerists will never let go of this.

I don’t quarrel with Sherman’s importance, and I find her late ’70s “Untitled Film Stills” quite arresting. The references to Hollywood and TV imagery were clear, sharply realized, and there was a nifty balance between artifice and spontaneity using minimal means to evoke rather than simply mimic. In her later series, Sherman goes heavy handed, Baroque, Gothic, macabre, clownish (literally), and what have you. A grab bag of identity cliches weighed down with pounds of makeup, costuming, and prosthetics. I lost interest twenty years ago.

The photograph above shows a woman of some means sitting for a portrait, her legs to the side, her arm resting just above her knee, with a frizzy pooch, staring at the camera with a pensive, perhaps tired, look. The woman floats in a seamless environment of  muted colors and surfaces. She represents a type–maybe a Park Avenue socialite. But we are gazing at a wax figure, not a person, even though that is Cindy Sherman in there somewhere. And like visiting a wax museum, we are amazed, but unmoved.

New York/Lower East Side

Time and Space on the Lower East Side, book and slipcover — © Brian Rose

I received a copy of Time and Space from the printer a few days ago and have been taking it around to stores in lower Manhattan. The response has been good. St. Mark’s Bookshop, the Strand, Clic, and the New Museum shop will all carry the book. I am working on others.

I have already posted information about the book presentation at the Duo Theater on April 2, but there is an important update. Please contact the sponsoring organization to confirm your attendance. The theater holds only about 90 people. There will be a limited number of books available for sale that evening. The full shipment will arrive from the printer in mid-April. Go here for more information about the book.

Time and Space on the Lower East Side
A Book Presentation and Slide Talk

Sponsored by the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation and Fourth Arts Block

Monday, April 2
7:00 – 8:30 p.m.
Duo Theater, 62 East 4th Street
(between 2nd Avenue & Bowery)
Free; reservations required
RSVP to rsvp@gvshp.org or (212) 475-9585 ext. 35

New York/Lower East Side

East 3rd Street — © Brian Rose

Progress update for Time and Space on the Lower East Side. The book is finished except for some back and forth concerning the coating on the cover. It will be a so-called image wrap cover rather than a dust jacket. I have one completed copy of the book, and I am beginning to show it  around.

Time and Space will be presented to the public on April 2, and I will be doing a slide talk, basically stepping through the pages of the book. Hopefully, I will have a full shipment of books by then, but if not, I will at least have 10 or 20 copies available at the event. Here is the basic information:

Time and Space on the Lower East Side
A Presentation by Brian Rose

Monday, April 2
7-8:30 PM
Duo Theater, 62 East 4th Street (between 2nd Avenue & the Bowery)
Free; reservations required
RSVP to rsvp@gvshp.org or (212) 475-9585 ext. 35  

Co-sponsored by Fourth Arts Block and the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation 

In 1980, Brian Rose, in collaboration with Ed Fausty, photographed the Lower East Side with a 4×5 view camera.  It was the neighborhood’s darkest, but most creative moment. While buildings crumbled and burned, artists and musicians came to explore and express the edgy quality of the place. After the wrenching events of 9/11, Rose was drawn back to New York as a subject for his camera and eventually decided to return to where he had begun–the Lower East Side.  From the outset it was clear that this would not be a simple before/after take on the place. While keeping an eye on the 1980 photographs, Rose sought to rediscover the place with fresh eyes, with the perspective of time, change, and history. The result, Time and Space on the Lower East Side, which will be available for sale and signing, is a set of photographs that looks backward and forward, that posits the idea that places are not simply “then and now,” but exist in a continuum of decay and rebirth.

New York/Central Park

Bethesda Fountain, Central Park, 1982 (35mm Kodachrome) — © Brian Rose

A couple of days ago I posted several photographs made while walking through Central Park. Early in my career I worked a lot in the park with both a view camera and a 35mm camera. I don’t remember the exact circumstances of the image above–often I was shooting for the Central Park Conservancy  when using the small camera. I had a 4×5 internegative made from the slide, and made a couple of prints, but never did much with them.

It’s a romantic image of New York, two couples passing each other on the stairs, almost black and white, quiet.

***

Yesterday, I met some friends at the Museum of Modern Art, and afterwards returned to my studio by subway. On the 57th Street platform I encountered a couple of musicians playing bluegrass, old time mountain music. One played a banjo, the other a mandolin. They were really wonderful, and several of us dropped bills in the open banjo case.

A man stepped forward carrying an oddly shaped black instrument case and gave some money. I immediately thought to myself, that is somebody.We ended up sitting opposite each other on the train, and I saw a sticker on his case — Kronos Quartet. It was their cellist, Jeffrey Zeigler, which I confirmed later when I got back to my studio. They had just played the night before at Zankel Hall in Carnegie Hall.

I once saw the Kronos Quartet play at Lincoln Center. They were performing the string quartets of Alfred Schnittke, the late Russian composer. I did not have tickets and went to the hall expecting to sit far from the stage. Instead, due to a last minute cancellation, I ended up in the front row just a few feet from the performers. It was both exhilarating and nerve wracking to sit so close, hearing every breath, every groan, seeing beads of sweat form on the musicians’ faces.

New York/Lower East Side

Inspiration, by Solon Borglum, St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery
© Brian Rose

I’m awaiting a finished bound book of Time and Space on the Lower East Side for final approval. After that, I should have a pretty good idea when to expect delivery of books. In the meantime, I am pleased to announce that I will be doing a slide talk based on Time and Space on April 2 at the Duo Multicultural Arts Center on East 4th Street. I have wanted to do an event on that block of 4th Street, which is where the cover photograph was made, and where so much of my early New York history took place. Hopefully, I will have books for sale that evening. I’ll have more details in the near future. I am still working on a location for a book launch party. Stay tuned.

Also, I will again be teaching a class in ICPs continuing education program — Photographing New York: The Lower East Side. We will be make photographs of the neighborhood and then put them together as a book using Blurb, the online book creation and publishing platform. Go here to find out more and to register.

 

New York/Around Town


Tenth Avenue — © Brian Rose

Odds and ends. Things to recommend. Things to dis.

The New York Times reports this morning that the film On the Bowery will soon be available on DVD. I saw it last year for the first time at Film Forum, and wrote about it extensively in my blog here and here. Alan Rogosin’s film is an astonishing portrayal of lost New York and lost souls, controversial then and now for its hybrid documentary/fictional format. Actual denizens of the Bowery, picked out by Rogosin, played the lead roles filmed in the streets and bars of the Bowery near Houston Street. It’s one of the great realist films ever made, a tour de force of editing and photography. The montage of grizzled faces at the end is unforgettable.


Fifth Avenue — © Brian Rose

The Radical Camera at the Jewish Museum, one of the best museum photography shows in recent years, will be up through March 25th. This show is about the New York Photo League and its community of photographers who explored the streets of the city during the 1930s and 1940s. Their work pushed aesthetic boundaries and embraced political engagement. The show is worth seeing both for its vivid depiction of New York and for illuminating the development of documentary street photography leading up to the modern era. There are a number of familiar names in the exhibition, like Berenice Abbott and Aaron Siskind, but most are lesser knowns, many who have fallen through the cracks, and are typically not included in the dominant narrative of photographic history.

From the blog DLK Collection: For me, I finally started to visually understand the small steps that made up the aesthetic and conceptual changes that took place between the 1930s and the 1950s, those missing evolutionary links between Abbott and Frank; The Americans now seems to me less like a thunder strike of genius out of nowhere and more like an innovative, original extrapolation from visual ideas that were already beginning to percolate around. This excellent show tells a uniquely New York story, and is worth a visit simply for the rich historical details of life in the city that it provides. But the reason I found this to be one of the best photography shows of the year is that it also successfully fills in an important (and largely missing) gap in the recounting of the American photographic narrative. Not only do I now have an increased appreciation for the talents of the many members of the New York Photo League (many of whom have been unjustly overlooked), I now understand much more clearly how the larger artistic puzzle fits together.

Read the whole review here.

We think of serious photography now in the context of museums and galleries, but it wasn’t really until the Family of Man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art with its “we are the world” sentimentality that the medium began to find favor in elite institutions. The Photo League embraced work that depicted gritty reality whether on the streets of the Lower East Side or the  beach at Coney Island–it did not celebrate the myth of American ascendency, and as a result, ran afoul of the anti-communist blacklisters of the early ’50s. The fact that many of its members were Jewish was also not coincidental.

Imagine. At the time of the Photo League, there was virtually no museums or art galleries that paid any attention to photography. In retrospect, it appears that the Photo League–its shows and its community of photographers–was central to the development of photography as social instrument and as an art form. And this story has not adequately been told until now. Do not miss this exhibition.


World Press winning photograph — © Samuel Aranda

There has already been lots written about this photograph, and I have no inclination to analyze something that’s not worth the effort. First of all, the premise of a grand prize for a single news photograph is wrong. The most interesting single photographs, in my opinion, are often the most open ended, often the least iconic, images that defy easy reading. That’s the opposite of what the World Press jurors usually come up with. They want a Muslim Mary cradling Jesus, or something.

This is a crappy photograph, maudlin, cliche.