New York/Enough

We are awash in gun imagery from Sarah Palin’s congressional crosshairs to the latest Hollywood movie Mechanic. The slogan along the top reads:

Someone has to fix the problems.

ENOUGH.

***

While I was talking this photograph an MTA employee walked by and in a stern voice said “You can’t take pictures down here!” I said, “Yes I can.” He just continued walking, but had he stopped I would have been happy to point him to:

Section 1050.9

Restricted areas and activities.

3. Photography, filming or video recording in any facility or conveyance is permitted except that ancillary equipment such as lights, reflectors or tripods may not be used. Members of the press holding valid identification issued by the New York City Police Department are hereby authorized to use necessary ancillary equipment. All photographic activity must be conducted in accordance with the provisions of this Part.

MTA NYC – Rules of Conduct

New York/WTC


Vesey Street — © Brian Rose

I went back to the WTC site yesterday and spent much of the day there–mostly in three spots. It was a cold cloudy day with snow occasionally falling. Conditions like that make using the view camera difficult, but it was not so extreme as to be unmanageable. I started out in the area around the Path Train station adjacent to 7 WTC, the one element of the new World Trade Center already completed. Tourists milled about an info kiosk, looked at the various renderings and photos plastered to construction fencing, and craned their necks up at 1 WTC, now more than 50 stories high.


Information Kiosk — © Brian Rose


Transportation Center rendering, Vesey Street — © Brian Rose


St. Paul’s churchyard — © Brian Rose

St. Paul’s Chapel survived 9/11 relatively unscathed including the historic gravestones in its churchyard. The sign at the bottom of the photo above shows the spire of the church situated between the former Twin Towers. I did several photographs in the churchyard and then headed back to my studio to warm up and get more film.


Fireman’s Memorial, Greenwich Street — © Brian Rose

When I returned to ground zero the snow had picked up. I did several views in the area around the Fireman’s Memorial. The Deutsche Bank building, which has taken almost ten years to demolish, is now down to the last floor, opening up a panoramic vista of skyscrapers including 1 WTC going up at center of the photo above. I made this iamge by holding my digital camera against the top of the view camera. The exposures with the 4×5 were in the 15 seconds to 1 minute range. Could be snow on the lens, so we’ll see how things turn out when I get the film back.

I am hoping that a few of these images can be incorporated into the WTC book bringing the narrative up to 2011.

New York/WTC


West Street — © Brian Rose

I went downtown this afternoon just after a light snowfall. It was cold, but tolerable and not overly windy. I did several shots with the view camera, one similar to the image above. 1 WTC is now over 50 floors up–almost as high as the adjacent 7 WTC. Visually double the height, and add a spire. That’s how tall this building will be when completed.

I may go back tomorrow. The Deutsche Bank building, which was damaged on 9/11, is now down to its last floor or two. It has taken this long because of a series of delays caused by the discovery of human remains, complicated asbestos removal, an accident, and a fatal fire. The building’s absence opens up new vistas on the overall site and removes a curse–if you believe such things–from ground zero.

My WTC book proposal will be reviewed by a publisher next week. Keep your fingers crossed–if you believe such things. See the book here.

New York/WTC


Lower Manhattan Skyline, 1982 (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose and Ed Fausty

This is lower Manhattan at its most heroic and romantic seen from the upper floor of a building in Brooklyn Heights. Since 1982, several bulky buildings have blocked up the foreground and obscured the thin spires of the early 20th century–and of course, the Twin Towers are gone. 1 World Trade Center is about 50 floors up now, and soon it will begin to rise above everything else.

After receiving a hardcopy version of WTC, my new book proposal concerning the World Trade Center, I decided to make a few changes. Text smaller, a few sequence tweaks, and a new end piece. I also created a text page opposite the image of the Deutsche Bank building, a cursed structure if ever there was one, only now about to fully demolished. It needed some explication.

I am reaching out to everyone I can about the book. I have some very good contacts, but limited. I need someone to come through for me on this. Otherwise, I’m not sure how this book will see the light of day.

The new version of WTC can be previewed here.

New York/Mohonk


The Shawangunk Ridge from Skytop — © Brian Rose

Here are a few more photographs of the Mohonk Preserve just west of New Paltz, New York about two hours north of New York City. It’s amazing that such a landscape exists so close to one of world’s largest cities. Stay at the Mohonk Mountain House if you’ve got a few bucks to spare. It’s expensive, but refreshingly unhip, even a bit frayed at the edges. The hotel architecture is fairytale eclectic–turreted castle here, Swiss chalet there. The grounds are dotted with small pavilions nestled on rocky outcroppings, a throwback to the 19th century concept of the romantic landscape.


Skytop Reservoir — © Brian Rose


Mohonk Preserve — © Brian Rose

New York/Mohonk


Mohonk Preserve, New Paltz, New York — © Brian Rose

I spent the New Year’s weekend Upstate with Renée and Brendan. We hiked and did a little cross country skiing. I began reading Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann. This morning the snowy ground and warm temperatures created a swirling fog that plunged us into a colorless world as we walked the trails of the Mohonk Preserve near New Paltz, New York.

New York/Bleecker Street


Bleecker Street — © Brian Rose

Couple feet of snow and huge drifts in New York. Walking from the subway on my way to Think Coffee on the corner of Bleecker Street and the Bowery I noticed two elderly people struggling to get over a wall of plowed snow. I snapped a quick picture of the scene, and then ran over to help the couple. I reached for the hand of the woman first, and then helped the man climb across onto the street. I asked them if they needed any more assistance, and then realized that it was Robert Frank (The Americans), and his wife, the artist June Leaf. I made sure they reached the door of their loft safely. I didn’t say anything more, or photograph them–aside from the accidental image above. Got my coffee on the corner.

New York/WTC Book


Front cover of WTC — © Brian Rose

I’ve more or less finished with the first draft of WTC, my photo book about the World Trade Center. Like so much I’ve been doing lately I have no idea what the outcome of it all will be. This ought to be a “popular” book, but it’s an oblique glance rather than a series of straight on architectural views. The fact is, none of the earlier photos were ever intended to be primarily about the WTC or the Twin Towers. Only the later pictures, the ground zero views, and the found vernacular images of the Twin Towers were consciously made as such. In many ways the book is about memory and the ephemeral presence of the towers on the skyline. My favorite illustration of the Twin Towers is the New Yorker cover done by Art Spiegelman–black towers against a black background. They are barely visible.


New Yorker cover by Art Spiegelman

The book is comprised of a number of different sections corresponding to time period and camera format. The earliest pictures were made in the late ’70s on 35mm Kodachrome, the ’80s pictures were made on 4×5 film, and most of the recent ground zero photos were done on 4×5. The post 9/11 Twin Towers collection was mostly done with a digital pocket camera, either a Ricoh GR or Sigma DP1. It’s interesting to see them together in a book all printed at the same scale despite coming from drastically different file sizes.


Close up of the skin of WTC tower — © Brian Rose

To break up the parts, or chapters, of the book, I’ve made made tightly cropped images of the skin of the Twin Towers–the pin striping that made the buildings seem to shimmer or appear slightly fuzzy from a distance. These cropped images bleed to the edges of the page and act as dividers.


Close up of the skin of WTC tower — © Brian Rose

I haven’t decided whether to make the book public on Blurb as yet, but I will make it semi-public here on my blog. Take a look. Any feedback is, of course, appreciated. Be kind. I’ve put days and days into this not counting the shooting itself. Be sure to look at the full screen preview.

New York/Barclay-Vesey


Barclay-Vesey building with 1 and 7 WTC (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose

This is one of my favorite buildings in NY–the Barclay-Vesey building–one of the great Art Deco telephone buildings. I’ve photographed it before–this time, from a few months ago, with the 4×5 camera. It’s a wonderfully athletic structure doing a sort of architectural twist at the hips. Already, the 1 WTC is twice is high, and will soon fill the entire patch of sky to the right.

New York/On the FDR


On the FDR Drive — © Brian Rose/Ed Fausty

Manhattan back in 1982 had many areas that were extremely quiet, even desolate. Few people lived in lower Manhattan then, and the weekends were exceptionally still. One Sunday morning Ed Fausty and I actually walked up on the FDR Drive and took several photographs. You would not want to try that today at any time of the week.

This is a new–and dramatically improved–scan of an image on my WTC webpage. I’ll update those images once I’m finished with the new ones.

New York/Under the FDR


Under the FDR Drive, 1982 (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose/Ed Fausty

I am working on a book about the World Trade Center that spans a 32 year time period. It’s a big job pulling together all the images from my archive, scanning new images and rescanning older material. In some ways this will be a book about the ghost of an icon in the way that my Berlin pictures, post-Wall, are about something that no longer exists. The fall of the Berlin Wall–marking the end of the Cold War–led to a profound reconfiguring of world politics. The fall of the Twin Towers signaled another altering of the world order–possibly not to the benefit of the United States, which appears vulnerable as a world power since 9/11. Such opinions, of course, lie outside the scope of my photographs, though they invite the viewer to take a long view of such matters.

The photograph above, which has never been printed before, was taken by me and Ed Fausty in 1982 underneath the FDR Drive in the area of the Fulton Fish Market. We were still working together at the completion of the Lower East Side project. It was a sullen day, the sun weakly shining between the buildings. A backlit situation, the warm glow at center/left is the sun position. Very difficult to print–or in this case work up in Photoshop.

For those interested in technical things, I selected the shadow areas of the image, and worked with curves to try to coax tonal range out of what could easily turn into a black mass. Working on contrast globally without selecting can be problematic because highlight detail is easily lost. The shadow /highlight tool can be useful if handled with care. Often I anchor points on the RGB curve at either end, and push and pull in between to achieve mid-range contrast. I also used a Wacom pen to paint dark and light areas, zooming in to small pieces of the image to work at a more detailed level. There is a limit to how much you can open up shadows, and if there’s nothing there, it should stay black. In a previous post I railed against Ansel Adams and his zone system approach to printing, but I’m not opposed to the idea of  achieving a full range of tonal values. I prefer, however, to work more intuitively.

You won’t be able to see this at the resolution of  your computer screen, but there are about 15 people standing on the observation deck of WTC 2 to the left. Easily visible in a decent sized print–if I ever get the chance to do an exhibition.

New York/Notes in Passing


Bookthugnation in Williamsburg — © Brian Rose

From the window of bookthugnation in Williamsburg, a reminder that rewriting or distorting history using photographs predates the invention of Photoshop.

Although I still don’t have a publisher for Time and Space on the Lower East Side, the book remains available for purchase via Blurb. At the end of March I will be doing a slide talk featuring the Lower East Side book at the Midtown public library on Fifth Avenue. I’ll provide more information as the date approaches.

Despite the lack of publisher, I am working on another book, this one about the World Trade Center. Hopefully, an antidote to the kinds of books I expect to see coinciding with the 10th anniversary of 9/11.

I will post more about this soon, but I envision the book as a visual elegy, a collection of several series of images–the Twin Towers glimpsed in early 35mm slides, monumental 4×5 views of Lower Manhattan from 1982, pictures made just after 9/11 of lower Broadway and the memorial at Union Square Park, recent images of the periphery of ground zero, and digital snapshots of Twin Towers images collected since I’ve been doing this blog.


The Dakota Apartments (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose

Finally, I’d like to take note that 30 years ago today John Lennon was gunned down outside the Dakota apartment building on Central Park West. Lennon was not just my “favorite Beatle,” he was one of the people who most inspired me as a young artist–songwriter and photographer. I never had the chance to see him perform live, but once saw him walking through Central Park arm in arm with Yoko Ono.

The photograph above was, which is from my New York primeval series, was taken from within the park. The image was one of several used by the Central Park Conservancy as thank yous to benefactors. My understanding is that a print of this photograph was given to Yoko Ono when she provided the money to create and maintain the landscape of Strawberry Fields, a part of Central Park near the Dakota dedicated to John Lennon.

Strawberry Fields forever.