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.

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

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.

E12th Street, 2003  (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose

From my World Trade Center book, WTC. Preview available here.

Happy New Year!

Stanton Street — © Brian Rose

Digging out today.

Please visit Reciprocity Failure for a few comments on one of my photographs. And take a look at my proposed World Trade Center book here. Let me know what you think.

Third Avenue and E5th Street — © Brian Rose

Shepard Fairey mural on the Cooper Square Hotel.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Broadway, Brooklyn — © Brian Rose

Without comment.

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.

Bedford and N7th Street — © Brian Rose

Happy Hanukkah!

Williamsburg, Brooklyn — © Brian Rose

Without comment.

Houston Street and Bowery 1957 — from the film On the Bowery

In the previous post I wrote about seeing On the Bowery at Film Forum, and I connected several film locations with contemporary views of the same places. One of the spots that jumped out at me was the corner of Houston and Bowery where the protagonist in the story, Ray Salyer, goes in search of a day’s work. In the screen capture above, he walks up to the window of a truck–we see him from inside–and behind him is a chain link enclosed handball court with several people playing. That playground, and other open spaces along Houston, was created in the 1930s when the buildings on the north side of the street were demolished, displacing thousands of tenement dwellers, to allow for the digging of the IND subway line.

Watching the film, I suddenly realized that the wall in the rear is the same one that Keith Haring painted on in 1982, and which was used to recreate his mural in 2008. Many other graffiti artists have also worked on its surface. The original wall shown in On the Bowery is still there, but presently boxed in, now being used to showcase a changing array of artists.

Unfinished Kenny Scharf on the Houston/Bowery wall — © Brian Rose

The photo above was taken from approximately the same position as the scene in On the Bowery. But there is a major difference, and it took me a while to figure things out. In the film there is a broad sidewalk and full depth handball court on the north side of Houston. Today, as you can see above, a swath of sidewalk and about four feet of gravel is all that separates the street from the wall. What happened is that Houston Street was widened along the north side turning a four lane undivided street into the monster thoroughfare that it is today.

From the Times:

THE widening of the Houston Street roadbed, to two 45-foot-wide roadways separated by a narrow mall, did not start until 1957. The Times reported that ”new black-on-yellow street name signs will replace the outmoded blue-on-white signs,” referring to the old luminous enameled signs that occasionally show up on eBay. The new Houston Street, an eight-lane crosstown artery, was opened in 1963, just before the area south of Houston Street began to emerge as an artists’ enclave.

Unfinished Kenny Scharf on the Houston/Bowery wall
— © Brian Rose

Although the concrete handball court wall remains (a historic artifact encased in plywood), the Ray Salyers of the world no longer congregate at Houston and Bowery looking for work.

Film Forum, Houston Street — © Brian Rose

On Wednesday I walked over to Film Forum on West  Houston to see On the Bowery, a movie I had heard about over the years, but never seen. It was recently re-released in a newly restored print. On the Bowery was made by Lionel Rogosin in 1957, and depicts three days of life on what was at that time America’s most infamous skid row. It is a hybrid film–part documentary, part directed narrative–and its characters were played by actual denizens of the Bowery, people that Rogosin had met over several month’s research before the movie was shot.

It remains, 53 years after its making, a cinematic tour de force. Rogosin worked with an extraordinary team, especially the cameraman Dick Bagley, and the editor Carl Lerner, who also worked on classic Hollywood movies such as 12 Angry Men. The story is minimal–a young man arrives on the Bowery with nothing but a suitcase and a powerful thirst for alcohol. He meets several regulars at a bar, ends up sleeping on the street, gets robbed, and is helped by his thief, a sly but sympathetic Bowery old-timer, who gives him some of the money he got from selling the newcomer’s stolen pocket watch.

The Bowery between Houston and Prince — still from On the Bowery

Most of the film was shot on the block between Houston and Prince Streets, and the Confidence Bar and Grill (above) once stood at the point where Stanton Street meets the Bowery. This is my corner of the world–my office/apartment is on Stanton just off the Bowery. When I first arrived in New York in 1977, I lived on East 4th Street five blocks north. The Bowery was still skid row in those days, and remained a seedy final destination for untold thousands until well into the 1990s. It is skid row no longer as high end restaurants and galleries supplant the cheap hotels and restaurant supply stores that dominated the area, some of which of can be seen in the film.

The Bowery between Houston and Prince — still from On the Bowery

The Bowery between Houston and Prince — similar view as above
— © Brian Rose

For nearly 75 years the Bowery was darkened by the elevated tracks running its length and on up Third Avenue into the Bronx. But by 1957 the steel viaduct was no longer used and was in the process of being demolished. In Rogosin’s film the hulking structure of the El lends many of the scenes a closed off subterranean feel. The stretch of Bowery buildings shown above still stands, almost as ragged looking as before, but without the encompassing gloom and claustrophobia.

The Bowery between Houston and Prince (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose

A few years ago I took the picture above with my view camera. The building at left with the cutouts attached to the facade is 254 Bowery, the former location of the Confidence Bar and Grill. In the movie still you can see the word Paragon on the building next door. That’s the same building above from around 2005.

The Bowery between Houston and Prince — © Brian Rose

But those buildings are gone now. The site was cleared for the construction of a luxury hotel, a project that died when the economy collapsed in 2008. The lot has sat vacant since then, but I read recently on Curbed, the architecture and real estate blog, that a new project may be in the works.

The Sunshine Hotel, Bowery and Stanton Street — still from On the Bowery

Near the end of On the Bowery, the lead character, Ray Salyer, goes to the Bowery Mission with hopes of staying sober, but after being preached to and finding he has to sleep on newspapers spread on the floor, he heads back out to the street. In a stunning montage, as he drinks himself into a stupor, he and the other men get louder and louder, epithets are hurled, fisticuffs break out–however ineffectual–and the scene unwinds in a chaotic drunken din. Salyer, with a woman on his arm, stumbles from the bar and heads for the Sunshine Hotel, where he slaps her away (seen above). The Sunshine is one of the last Bowery flophouses, right next door to the New Museum, still home to a dwindling assortment of derelict men, a no vacancy sign on the door, the end in sight.

The film closes with another montage, as astonishing as the barroom scene. As Salyer stands on the Bowery contemplating his next move, a sequence of closeups of faces is shown, each held on the screen a few seconds. Each visage a portrait of utter dissolution, each line and crease, stubble of beard and trickle of dried blood, rendered vividly, dispassionately.

There is no redemption suggested in this ending, and even though On the Bowery was hailed by many, and nominated for an Oscar, its bleak outlook was not generally welcome in the propagandistic 1950s. Rogosin’s On the Bowery shares the unsparing outlook of Robert Frank who also revealed the underside of American society in his book The Americans. Frank’s documentary approach has been widely absorbed by several generations of photographers, but Rogosin’s method, combining documentary and staged reality, remains under appreciated by those of us schooled in the cinema verite style.

Seeing the movie, and then walking back to my office right where the film was made, a neighborhood already changed, undergoing even more radical transformation–it’s quite a lot to reflect on.

Smith Street Station, Brooklyn — © Brian Rose

If you’ve been following this blog, you know that I have been piecing together a series of images that relate directly or indirectly to the World Trade Center. A couple of years ago I came across a Twin Towers mural near the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn. I did a quick snapshot of it with the intention of returning to photograph it with the view camera. This morning, I finally got back there.

I took the F Train, which emerges from underground just past Carroll Gardens in Brooklyn. The tracks are carried high up on a massive steel bridge that spans the Gowanus Canal, an infamously polluted industrial area that has become a haven for artists, and as a result, ripe for upper middle class development. With the downturn in the economy, however, and given the cost of cleaning up the area, not much has happened. The Gowanus is still a fabulously gritty blue collar lowland between Carroll Gardens and Park Slope, two of Brooklyn’s most desirable neighborhoods.

WTC mural on Smith Street, Brooklyn — © Brian Rose

Across the street from the subway entrance is a somewhat forlorn car wash decorated with tattered red white and blue streamers–but across Smith Street a row of old houses with slanted roofs and dormer windows is being renovated. The WTC mural with its flag motif  is painted on the side of a small building next to a chain linked vacant lot. Across the street from the mural is a heating oil depot where trucks drive up and fill their tanks. A glass enclosed command post overlooks the operation, and when I set up my camera on the asphalt just off the sidewalk, I was informed by a stern voice coming over a loudspeaker that I was standing on private property. I managed to get off one shot with my 4×5 camera.

Smith Street, Brooklyn — © Brian Rose

Retreating from the oil depot, I went across the street and set up the camera at an oblique angle to the mural. Promptly, a gruff voice barked accusingly, “Are you taking a picture of my truck?” I jerked my head toward the voice, and saw a grinning face sitting behind the wheel of a truck with a battered container mounted behind. He was kidding. I told him I just got yelled at by the guys across the street, and was a little jumpy. We chatted a bit, he smiled for the camera and roared off.

WTC mural on Smith Street, Brooklyn — © Brian Rose

Here is the image taken from “private property.” And while I think the 4×5 shot will be good, I really like these two white trucks caught left and right in the frame. You don’t see it the pictures, but there were lots of people walking around–some pretty damaged people it seemed to me–probably coming from some sort of social services facility nearby. Others were standing around under the subway viaduct waiting for a bus, or perhaps, waiting to be picked up as day laborers.

One guy started talking to me, asked me what I was doing. I pointed to the mural and told him I was photographing WTC things. He asked me about the mosque/cultural center proposed for downtown near ground zero. I looked at him more intently–he seemed to be Hispanic–I didn’t ask him where he was from. He had just seen an article in the paper. The group building the center was applying for money meant to support projects around the Word Trade Center site. The right wingers were agitating again. He wanted to know what I thought about it. I said, ” I know Christians, Jews, and I know Muslims. This is New York. I think they should be able to build their center. He said, somewhat to my surprise, “I’m with you.”

Greenpoint, Queens (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose

This is my America, from my heart, and by my heart. I give it now to my children and grandchildren, and to yours, so they will always know what it was like in America when people were free.

–Sarah Palin (from the introduction to her forthcoming book America By Heart)

Delusional and dangerous.