Henry Street, 1980 (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose and Ed Fausty

In my periodic visits to the World Trade Center–ground zero as it still called–it has been evident to me that some visitors to the site appear involved in something more than casually ogling the impressive rebuilding of the area. As downtown New Yorkers rush to appointments, dodge the construction clutter, and brush by the meandering clusters of tourists, they are making a pilgrimage to a hallowed place.

Less than a year after September 11, while the debris and the remains of 2,750 people were still being sifted through, I took part in Listening to the City at the Javits Center where more than 4,000 citizens expressed their opinions on how to honor the dead and to rebuild. There were some who wanted the site to lie fallow, as a park or purely as a memorial. But the majority present that day wanted a reclaimed skyline, a memorial that preserved the footprints of the Twin Towers, and space for cultural activities. New Yorkers, while still in shock and grief, were beginning to do what this city is famous for–move forward.

Holocaust Memorial, Berlin (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose

The selection of a site plan and its implementation has been far from an ideal process. The buildings presently rising on and around the site are less inspiring than they might have been, and the memorial and accompanying museum may or may not strike the right notes–time will tell. I am reminded of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, which as vast as it is, and as serious as its intent, somehow fails to encompass the scope of what it memorializes. As tourists caper about the stone monoliths and pose for snapshots, the monument’s finely conceived architecture somehow civilizes what was the opposite–one of the darkest, most violent events in human history.

The act of remembering is ultimately a private experience, but successful memorials allow for the collective sharing of memories by providing a tangible icon or by preserving a particular place. A memorial can be as modest as a plaque or the planting of a tree, and although I believe that 9/11 deserves something on a larger scale,  I am skeptical of the motives that demand memorials as massive as the one in Berlin or the one under construction at ground zero. Both are political statements–Berlin being about ritualized atonement. And the unfinished 9/11 memorial–I don’t know–the battle over its meaning is just beginning. But seeing the tourists milling about reverently, and witnessing the recent hue and cry over the proposed Islamic cultural center a few blocks away from ground zero, greatly worries me.

New York is arguably the most diverse city in the world–in any number of aspects–diversity of origin, language, and of religious faith. It is a city where the rich and poor bump up against each other daily. It has been that way since the Dutch settled on the Hudson and created a center of trade for the West India Company. Those who know New York well understand that it is a city of micro neighborhoods, of blocks, and of myriad groups that occupy limited space cheek by jowl. That an Islamic center should be located in Tribeca a few blocks from the World Trade Center is of little significance to most people who live and work here.

Union Square Park one week after 9/11 (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose

The shrill voices against the “mosque,” calling it a desecration of ground zero, are coming mostly from outside New York. They have every right, of course, to yell as loud as they want. But they show no respect for those of us who live here, who witnessed the collapse of the towers, who lost family or friends, who cringe at every glimpse of videos or photos of the falling towers. They have no personal connection to this town–to that place, that block. They see ground zero only in abstract political terms, even as they claim to speak for the families of those killed, and their motives are fueled by fear, intolerance, and victimhood.

New Yorkers have moved on. We were badly damaged, but we are not victims. We are proud of this city for how it has pulled itself together since 9/11, proud of the diversity that defines us, and proud to be both Americans and citizens of the world’s greatest metropolis.

You got a problem with that?

—

UPDATE

The American Freedom Defense Initiative, which is run by Pamela Geller, a prominent right-wing blogger is planning an ad campaign for New York City buses showing the Twin Towers on fire with a plane about to hit. A rendering of the proposed mosque (which will actually be several blocks away) will be shown with the words “why here?”

From the Times:

Asked if she was concerned that the image of the flaming twin towers might upset some New Yorkers, Ms. Geller, in a brief interview on Monday, replied: “Not at all. It’s part of American history.”

As I was saying in my post above, these people do not care about New Yorkers nor do they care about the families of the victims. Their message is hatred, pure and simple.

From the Williamsburg Bridge, 1980 (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose and Ed Fausty

There are several 1980 photographs from Time and Space on the Lower East Side that were not included in the original exhibition, either because they were overlooked or had technical problems. The photo above was difficult to print, the dark foreground and relatively bright sky, a bit of camera shake from the vibrating bridge.  In Photoshop, however, I was able to solve most of the problems, though the slight shake remains, just barely noticeable when enlarged.

Stan Banos of Reciprocity Failure went through all the entries in the Blurb Photography Book Now contest, and came up with five stand outs, including his own book, Small Rewards. I trolled through the 2,000 plus books myself–rather randomly–it would take hours to see them all. And I’m not sure whether I feel uplifted by the incredible energy that went into them, or depressed by how few are really special. I’m pleased, however, to be included as one of Stan’s picks.

Reciprocity Failure (Blurb contest picks)
Reciprocity Failure (earlier post)

Other blogs:

EV Grieve, 1st post
EV Grieve, 2nd post
City Room, the New York Times

The phone burbled, it was a text from my painter friend Tim Raymond. He was on the road heading down from Buffalo, the city where he somehow had found himself marooned some years ago. I’ve known Tim since the mid-70s when we lived in Baltimore–I was an art student at the Maryland Institute for a while, and I’d met his wife Cathy who was a fellow student. Tim and I have things in common. We are both graduates of Cooper Union, though attending at different times, and we were both bicycle messengers in Washington, D.C., though also at different times. And we’re both artists, still hanging in there after years of less than resounding success in the marketplace.

Luncheon of the Boating Party, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, the Phillips Collection

Back in my D.C. messenger days, when work was slow, I’d often retreat to the Phillips Collection with its glorious collection and intimate scale. I developed special relationships with a number of the paintings in the museum, including Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s tour de force  Luncheon of the Boating Party. It’s easy to write off Renoir, who produced an enormous amount of gauzy fleshy dross alongside a generous number of masterpieces. The Boating Party is rigorously ordered, full of oblique compositional lines, echoed by the sidelong glances of the various figures, punctuated by the dappled light, sprinkling of red lips, and the almost palpable tinkling of wine glasses and murmur of overlapping conversations. I could go on.

Tim’s text also included, cryptically, that he was coming to New York to see a Renoir, which I couldn’t make any sense of. The next I heard from Tim he was struggling to park on 34th Street near 5th Avenue, and had already managed to get a parking ticket for leaving his car in a loading zone. Once I had helped extricate Tim and his car out of the traffic maw of Manhattan, he filled me in about the Renoir.

The Large Bathers, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, The Philadelphia Museum

Ten year ago, Greg Kitchen, an old acquaintance of Tim’s ex-wife had bought a pastel at an antique sale of two nude bathers signed “Renoir” at the bottom. He paid less than $200 for it. Assuming its legitimacy, it is a highly detailed study for Renoir’s Large Bathers painting, which hangs in the Philadelphia Museum, and could be worth a fortune. Kitchen, so it seems, has been getting the run around from the auction houses and dealers unwilling to seriously consider the authenticity of the drawing. In Tim, he hoped to find an ally and someone who could help him better present his case.

Tim showed me a photo of the pastel on his iPhone, and I was immediately doubtful. The drawing appeared too polished to be a study–and too much about line and volume–while Renoir is known more for his light and color. But Tim convinced me I should come along with him to meet Kitchen and hopefully see the original piece. We arrived at his loft on W28th Street in a raucous part of Manhattan full of cheap fashion wholesalers who are periodically raided for selling counterfeit brand name merchandise. It seemed the appropriate place for a Renoir forgery.

Greg Kitchen, Tim Raymond, and the Renoir — © Brian Rose

Kitchen laid out his case for the authenticity of the drawing in a rambling narrative, displaying various documents, letters, and research material. It was clear to me as an outsider with no vested interest that he needed a much more organized and believable presentation of the facts. Nevertheless, I came to understand that the tests Kitchen has had done on the paper and pigments all support the authenticity of the drawing, though none represents definitive proof. Forgeries can be incredibly sophisticated. A full size photograph of the bathers was laid out on the floor of the loft, and it appeared to me, still, unconvincing. I sat on the windowsill of the loft gazing up a the Empire State Building looming above the decorative railing of the fire escape. But as I thought more about the what Renoir was trying to do with his Large Bathers, the drawing qualities began to make more sense. Here’s some text from the Philadelphia Museum website:

The sculptural rendering of the figures against a shimmering landscape and the careful application of dry paint reflect the tradition of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French painting. Renoir—in an attempt to reconcile this tradition with modern painting—labored over this work for three years, making numerous preparatory drawings for individual figures and at least two full-scale, multifigure drawings. Faced with criticism of his new style after completing The Large Bathers, an exhausted Renoir never again devoted such painstaking effort to a single work.

The Empire State Building from W28th Street — © Brian Rose

This drawing, which is clearly not a copy of any of the other studies, could represent an attempt by Renoir to fully flesh out, as it were, the volumetric qualities of the female figures before proceeding to the actual painting. There was only one thing to do–see the original–presently locked away in a Chelsea storage facility. So, Tim and I trailed Greg Kitchen ten blocks over to the West Side. I snapped another Empire State Building image along the way, this time a vinyl ad stretched over some scaffolding.

Image of the Empire State Building — © Brian Rose

The drawing was stowed in a standard mini-storage closet, packed in a nondescript cardboard box held together with packing tape. Kitchen opened the box and removed the foam and bubble wrap swaddling his precious find. And there it was. Astonishing. A depth of volume and color, a presence, completely unavailable in the photo we had looked at earlier. There were details in the surface, scratch marks, erasures, the ghostly evidence of a third figure on the right corresponding with the composition of the finished Large Bathers. The skin of the most forward of the figures was opalescent, the faintest hint of blue veining showing through. If this wasn’t a genuine Renoir, then it was a masterful forgery.

A Girl with a Watering Can, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, The National Gallery of Art

Seeing the pastel in person, I was reminded again that Renoir was often the maker of insipid images. Divorced of the visceral quality of the paint, they have become icons of bourgeois sophistication–like the crappy reproduction of a Girl with Watering Can that hung over the piano that no one ever played, in the living that no one ever used, in the faux colonial ranch house I grew up in. We are consumers of images with little connection to the materiality, the texture of the real, whether it’s a painting or the fabric of life itself. But, I digress.

Tim and I left Greg Kitchen on the corner, strolled the High Line down to the Meat Packing District, and retreated to a beer garden under the rail viaduct. It was blissfully cool in the shade, mild weather, following a stupifyingly hot July. It was clear, despite our reaction to the actual drawing, that this was going to be a difficult case, a complex mystery to unravel. There had been a robbery in Renoir’s studio in the late 19th century. Had the drawing been stolen? The last known owners were in Switzerland in the 1940s, and inquiries there had gone nowhere. There were intimations of nefarious doings–had the drawing been appropriated from Jewish owners doomed to Hitler’s gas chambers?

It’s now Tim’s job to clean up the narrative and collate the existing documentation. He and I are laughable amateurs in the world of international art intrigue. Ultimately, this will come down to the art experts, the lawyers, all who will extract their pounds of flesh. Or as I joked with Tim, Kitchen could always take it to the Antiques Road Show on PBS. Imagine, a drawing signed by Renoir bought at an antique fair for under $200, turns out to be a genuine figure study for one his most important paintings, worth–say–$2,000,000?

Photograph by Leonard Nimoy

Ira, an advertising executive: “My secret self is a wizard who takes illusions and makes people think they are real.”

In the Times, according to Joseph Thompson, the director of Mass MoCA where Leonard Nimoy is having his first major museum show:

This equivocation between’s the subject’s plastic, almost sculptural presence, and its literal groundedness, makes for compelling work, all the more so since these are our neighbors caught there.

Okie dokie.

Bedford and N6th Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn — © Brian Rose

Bedford and N5th Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn — © Brian Rose

Two pictures take 30 seconds apart.

The Old Guard Fife and Drum Corps and the alumni of the Colonial Williamsburg Fifes and Drums — arrow points at me.

Despite my failed attempts at a songwriting career, I remain a good, if largely unknown, song poet. It sounds a little grandiose, but it’s a craft I have taken seriously for many years. Some of my friends have, indeed, made careers of it. But what I did as a teenager still overshadows my later musical endeavors. I was the Sergeant Major of the Colonial Williamsburg Fifes and Drums for four years, from age 13 through 17. The last six months or so of my tenure was spent as Fife Sergeant, having been demoted to the top fifing position to accommodate the changing adult leadership of the corps.

Our music master, George Carroll was leaving. Under Carroll’s tutelage we had become one of the pre-eminent fife and drum outfits in the world. In 1960, before coming to our corps Carroll had founded the Old Guard Fife and Drum,  a part of the 3rd U.S. Infantry stationed at Ft. Myer adjacent to the Arlington National Cemetery. In 1961, Carroll took over leadership of the fledgling fife and drum corps of Colonial Williamsburg. Three years later, I joined the corps at age 9.

In 1967, shortly after turning 13, I was promoted to Sergeant Major of the corps. Promotion was largely a matter of proficiency on your instrument, and nowadays one might wait years for an opening in the ranks. In my case, the corps was growing, and the first generation of players was leaving. So, a spot opened quickly.

In April of 1967 the corps travelled to Washington, D.C. to perform on the Mall in an evening “Great Tattoo.” The program featured the Old Guard Fife and Drum, the Marine Corps Band, and the U.S. Air Force Pipe Band. George Carroll had been asked at the last minute, as I recall it, to narrate the program, and earlier in the day he handed the drum major’s stick, or mace, to me and told me I was to lead the corps onto the field. It was a moment I will never forget, and I am still dumbfounded that Carroll had confidence in me to lead us in what was, up to that point, the most important performance in the corps’ history.

Weekend before last, the alumni of the Colonial Williamsburg Fifes and Drums–many of us participants in the tattoo in 1967–once again took to the field with the Old Guard Fife and Drum, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary, this time to honor George Carroll. It was not on the Mall in Washington, but on a baseball field in Deep River, Connecticut, the location of the Deep River Ancient Muster, the largest fife and drum gathering in the world. Fortunately, Lance Pedigo, the current CW Fifes and Drums leader was available to drum major. I settled in comfortably among the fifers.

Fire Island — © Brian Rose

Got invited to Fire Island on a fiery hot day in New York. It was considerably cooler at the beach. Ended the day as the sun set on the Lonelyville annual picnic.

Ludlow Street and Delancey — © Brian Rose

I’ve taking the book around–Time and Space on the Lower East Side. The response has been positive, even enthusiastic. Have sold six books, and could place them on consignment at St. Mark’s Books and the Tenement Museum shop. But with the store markup the price is a bit high printing them out one at a time using Blurb. So, I’m not sure what to do. By all means visit the Blurb site and page through the book. Buy one if you can–no store markup. Leave a comment. It looks beautiful, and whether I publish later or not, it’s a very collectible, unique, item. I even managed to misspell Shepard Fairey’s name in one of the text pieces.

Another blog has featured the book:

Reciprocity Failure

The blogs from last week:

EV Grieve, 1st post
EV Grieve, 2nd post
City Room, the New York Times

Pierrepont Family Memorial, Green-Wood Cemetery — © Brian Rose

Designed by Richard Upjohn, architect of Trinity Church and the entrance gate to Green-Wood.

From the Green-Wood website:

Henry Evelyn Pierrepont was known as the “first citizen” of Brooklyn for good reason. He, along with his father Hezekiah B. and mother Anna Maria before him, played a significant role in the planning of Brooklyn as a physical city, its crucial ferry services to New York, and the establishment of Green-Wood Cemetery itself. He is considered by some to be one of the first “city planners” in the United States, a logical evolution from his father’s status as the first important suburban (Brooklyn Heights) real-estate developer in American History. Pierrepont Street in the Heights commemorates the family to this day.

Green-Wood Cemetery — © Brian Rose

Last week I was In Green-Wood cemetery.

Since uploading my book to Blurb last week, I’ve gotten some welcome publicity for Time and Space on the Lower East Side. Here are some blogs that have taken note:

EV Grieve, 1st post
EV Grieve, 2nd post
City Room, the New York Times

Time and Space on the Lower East Side is a project begun in 1980 when Ed Fausty and I–both recent Cooper Union grads–photographed the neighborhood with a 4×5 view camera. After the work was exhibited at the Henry Street Settlement in New York and in Nancy, France, the photographs have remained in my archive unseen until now.

In the aftermath of 9/11 I began thinking of a way to address what had happened to the city. I finally concluded that the best way for me to respond was to return to where I had started, the Lower East Side. Major changes were sweeping the city post 9/11, the great irony being that the result of such a destructive act was a flood of money and people into New York, especially Manhattan. The Lower East Side in the past century had mostly escaped the flow of wealth from one part of Manhattan to another. It remained a mostly poor, immigrant, neighborhood tucked beneath the bridges and the skyscrapers of Wall Street. It would not escape this time. Larger historical and economic forces intervened, and the invisible boundary between the Lower East Side and the rest of the city was breached.

I restarted my project first  by attempting to print the 1980 photographs, and I quickly discovered that the color film had deteriorated making it nearly impossible to make a satisfactory print. I then experimented with scanning the 4×5 negatives–pushing and pulling the color this way and that–and eventually found that it was possible to recover the original color, and in some cases get more out of the negatives than in the earlier analog prints.

In 2005 I began re-photographing the neighborhood, retracing my steps with the view camera, this time working alone. I decided from the beginning that I did not want to do a simple before/after look at things. Although it’s always interesting to compare such images, it is an extremely limited concept of seeing and evaluating the passage of time. I wanted to rediscover the place with fresh eyes, with the perspective of time, change, and history. The result, still being added to, 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.

By 2010 I had made hundreds of new photographs of the Lower East Side. My first attempt at a book proposal went nowhere. The publisher of my earlier book The Lost Border was not able to take it on, and another well-known New York photo book publisher expressed disappointment that it was not a before/after book. Should have known. So, I decided to create my own book, float it out there, and see what kind of interest there was. The hope is, that a publisher will take an interest, and that a museum or gallery will do an exhibition.

In the meantime, the book is available to page through on Blurb’s website. I’ve priced the book very low, considering that it is a limited edition, one book at a time printing. Please buy if you can, or leave a comment on the Blurb site. Your support and encouragement is appreciated.

The book can be seen here or by clicking on the image above.

I’ve been walking mornings between Williamsburg and the Lower East Side.

Williamsburg Bridge — © Brian Rose

Williamsburg Bridge — © Brian Rose

The Shrine, 2000 by Robert Buck — © Brian Rose

I visited four or five of the LES galleries participating in Lush Life, a multi-gallery exhibition based on the chapters of Richard Prices crime novel. Although the book is first and foremost a story built on dialogue and character, over the length of the novel, it evokes a vivid sense of place, a sense of this particular moment in the history of the Lower East Side. In Lush Life, the exhibition, each gallery takes on a chapter of the novel, and the curators selected pieces relating to the content of each particular chapter. Go here for a comprehensive review in the New York Times.

Navigating Lower East Side galleries can be pretty daunting because so much of the art seems the expression of an insular art community with its own disconnected language. Lush Life, however, is expansive and generous in its messages, possibly because the work is tethered to tangible themes and narrative. I liked a lot of what I saw, but was especially taken by the pieces shown in Invisible-Exports on Orchard Street based on Chapter Three: First Bird (A Few Butterflies). It’s nice to see real painting in Karen Heagle’s image of vultures picking through garbage. And I found Dana Levy’s video of  live white doves fluttering about a museum gallery of stuffed birds quite mesmerizing.

A few of the galleries were closed on Saturday–the day after the New York Times review appeared–and I saw a number of disappointed people peering into the darkened windows. Lehman-Maupin was closed, but one of its pieces was on display on the sidewalk out front, a shrine of flowers, stuffed animals, candles, and the like, which was a fairly literal reference to the street memorial in Lush Life, the book. I preferred Christoph Draeger’s ghost bikes at Invisible-Exports, back-lit photographs of the white bikes seen around the neighborhood marking fatal bicycle accidents.

Rivington and Allen Street — © Brian Rose

An interesting review in Friday’s Times about a multi-gallery group show based on the chapters of Richard’s Price’s book Lush Life, a crime novel set in the Lower East Side. Nine galleries and nine book chapters. Hope to take a look at some of the exhibits later today.

Holland Cotter of the Times feels that the Price pulls his punches with “anodyne doses of redemption” that undercut “whatever moral complexity the story might have had.” I’m not sure about that, but I do think that Lush Life is a splendidly vivid depiction of the present day Lower East Side. So much written about the neighborhood is seeped in nostalgia, and contemporary commentators often slip into elegiac despair when talking about the Lower East Side that was. Price writes about the place as it is.

Cotter concludes his review nicely by saying that even if you haven’t read the book, the show “will still get you walking the streets of a neighborhood that is, with continuing transformation, both a threat and a promise, a morality tale in itself.”

Williamsburg, Brooklyn — © Brian Rose

Miami on the East River.

Left: Economist cover with doctored photo.
Center: Undoctored photo (Larry Downing/Reuters).
Right: Undoctored photo superimposed on cover.

Once again, another Photoshop nightmare. The Economist cropped and cloned a perfectly good image in order to achieve dramatic effect for their cover story on Obama and the BP oil spill. In a way it’s no big deal–no harm no foul–you might say. But…

Once again, a predetermined editorial narrative drives the ethical train wreck. It’s not a photograph–a slice of messy reality–it’s an illustration used to convey a point of view. That’s the crux of the problem. Not which pixels were cloned, or what extraneous details were cropped out. It’s the notion that photographs are not in themselves enough. They are too raw, too vague, too allusive. Too real.

Maybe this is what the editors were suggesting.

Fulton Street — © Brian Rose

Wearing my flag tie on the 4th.