New York/The New Museum

The New Museum — © Brian Rose

Hell Yes!–or–Don’t Worry Be Happy

I have to agree with Fred Bernstein in the Architects Newspaper Blog about the New Museum and its garish Hell Yes! — a multi-hued text piece by Ugo Rondinone. To Bernstein, hanging the kitschy lettering on the shimmering scrim of SANAA’s facade is “like wearing a campaign button on a wedding veil.” My studio is around the corner from the museum, and the Hell Yes! has become a daily irritant. There are worse public sculptures in the city, but none that I can think of that so insistently imprint themselves on one’s brain.

SANAA’s design manages to be both elegant and playful, and the off kilter box effect abstractly mimics the hodgepodge of buildings of the Bowery, evoking, perhaps, the boxes and steel refrigerator units and other restaurant appliances being manhandled on and off of trucks on the street nearby. The architectural joke, however, is good natured and feels right. But Rondinone’s goofball element spoils the slightly tipsy balance. While the passing artist proletariat, glancing up at the museum tower, grumbles under their breaths, Hell No!

The current show, Skin Fruit, curated by Jeff Koons from the collection of New Museum board member Dakis Joannou certainly does nothing to dissipate the grumbling. Peter Schejldahl of the New Yorker commenting on the incestuous nature of the exhibition in a narrated slideshow says:

What makes the occasion a real lightening rod to my mind is  a growing populist resentment of the impunity of wealth in the recent era symbolized by the art market. Younger generations coming up can no longer count on the promise of ascension to the starry feeding trough of the market as it has pertained until the current recession. Full article here.

I have enjoyed a number of the exhibitions at the New Museum, and was pleased to see the retrospective of David Goldblatt there, as well as photographs by William Christenberry in an earlier show. But the collusion between commercial galleries, collectors, and museum curators has gotten completely out of hand, and this exhibition takes the cake–or to flog the metaphor–declaims, Let them eat cake!

New York/Hudson River Park

Hudson River Park — © Brian Rose

A beautiful day in New York. It got up above 50F degrees. After dropping my son off at a middle school test/interview–even public schools are selective in New York–I walked several miles along the Hudson. Just took a few pictures.

Hudson River Park — © Brian Rose

Still a lot of snow piled up in places, but it’s going fast. The parks police placed yellow tape around this snow mountain and posted a sign. Keep off.

New York/Digital Ethics

There’s been a lot of discussion recently about Photoshop manipulation of images. It is a never ending debate–what is allowable, appropriate, ethical, etc. As a photographer whose work is mostly rooted in the visually tangible world, I avoid altering images, and I crop minimally. It is an unstated, but understood, agreement with myself and with my viewers. But at the same time I am well aware of the tenuous hold on reality that any photograph has. For me, that dichotomy between the real and the unreal is integral to what makes photography compelling. Veracity is another issue. It may be dependent on adherence to certain norms, but it is not, in the end, always as clear cut as people think, or wish it to be.

The latest issue, involves the disqualification of a winner in the World Press Photo contest, an annual event held in Amsterdam, which showcases the best of photojournalism. The controversy involves the Ukrainian photographer Stepan Rudik who won third prize in sports features for his pictures of “street fighting.” Because of past questions about the honesty of digital images, this year photographers were required to furnish the RAW files–digital negatives–downloaded directly from cameras. These could then be compared with the final submitted images. The basic rules being that traditional darkroom manipulation is allowed (cropping, dodging and burning), but not digital cloning or removing unwanted distractions.

Here’s the silliness we end up with:

Rudik’s winning submission

Rudik’s original uncropped, unconverted RAW image

Rudik’s cropped image with no other changes

What disqualified Rudik was not the cropping, not the converting to black and white, not the digitally introduced grain, not the heavy burning of the margins of the image. The photo was disqualified because a bit of extraneous detail–someone’s foot–seen between the fighter’s thumb and forefinger was cloned out.

I’m not going to defend Rudik who should have known better, or should have consulted the rules more carefully. Contests like World Press Photo, however, routinely reward photographs for calculated affect, false sentiment, misleading context, you name it. To their credit, they seek to honor those who, in many cases, risk their lives to report on conflicts around the globe, but so often end up promoting aesthetic cliches over less mediated documents, and in doing so, create the the problem that led to Stepan Rudik’s disqualification.

Full story and discussion here.

New York/Jack Hardy

Jack hardy (with Mandolin) and Brian Rose (yellow shirt) on stage at Folk City, the legendary folk club (late ’70s)

Jack Hardy, the songwriter, came over to my studio today to have me scan some old snapshots–some had me in them. I’ve known Jack since 1977 when I arrived in New York. I was an early participate in the songwriters exchange that Jack started and still hosts in his apartment on Houston Street. The photo above was taken while performing Jack’s “Drinking Song.”

Brian Rose and Suzanne Vega (early ’80s) — photo by Theodore Lee

There were so few pictures taken of us in those days, so one can’t really complain about the quality. I was a reluctant photographer when hanging out with my songwriter friends, not wanting to be the designated picture taker at every event. In retrospect, I should have done more. Recently, I was asked for a photograph of me and Suzanne Vega–somehow I didn’t have a single one. Well here’s one.

New York/Kahn Bath House

Trenton Bath House — © Brian Rose

Trenton Bath House — © Brian Rose

Limited demolition and construction has already begun on the Louis Kahn bath house, so I will not be doing “before” pictures with the 4×5 camera. Disappointed that there wasn’t the money to get me down there in time, but I have been working on the photographs I did with my Sigma DP1, and feel that I have a reasonably good record of the building as it stood at the end of its first life, so to speak.

Trenton Bath House — © Brian Rose

I wrote about this earlier–about approaching the building as a modern day ruin–the result of a continuous process of use, neglect, and decay that will be irrevocably disrupted. This is restoration that absolutely needs to be done, however, and I am looking forward to seeing the building once it has been returned to its original state. It will be properly dignified as architectural icon while still serving in its prosaic role as changing rooms for a swimming pool.

Brian Rose at the Trenton Bath House — photo by Michael Mills

We are still talking about doing a book on the Bath House–its history, significance, how it was saved, and the process of restoring it. I will photograph the finished project with the full treatment–probably 4×5 film. But in the meantime, I have put a number of my photographs of the Bath House here on my website.

New York/Vinegar Hill

Hudson Avenue and Water Street — © Brian Rose

Vinegar Hill is a small neighborhood in Brooklyn located between the Brooklyn Navy Yard and Dumbo. Go here for a map.

We did a long walk on Monday from Williamsburg to Dumbo, over the Brooklyn Bridge, up Broadway, and then over the Williamsburg Bridge to make a full circle. About 10 miles.

New York/Nolita

Mott Street between Prince and Spring — © Brian Rose

Used to be part of Little Italy, now known as Nolita. Bah. Lots of small shops, designer clothes, as well as vestiges of its Italian roots. An intimate urban neighborhood, it’s just on the other side of the Bowery from my studio on Stanton Street. I was getting some coffee when I took this photograph through the store window.

New York/Chelsea

10th Avenue — © Brian Rose

First post using WordPress. It hasn’t gone as smoothly as I hoped. Can’t seem to  install into the same location as my Blogger site. So, I’m redirecting people here, and giving up on saving my Blogger permalinks. In any case, I’m happy with the new interface, both the look of the blog and the WordPress dashboard.

10th Avenue in the teens and twenties is a hodgepodge of factory buildings, tenements, housing projects, and parking lots–even a seminary. To the west is the gallery district with contemporary housing sprouting here and there like mushrooms. In the photo above is a new condominium by Neil Denari cantilevered over the High Line. You can see some terrific computer renderings here.

10th Avenue — © Brian Rose

An old New York survivor barely hanging on.

10th Avenue — © Brian Rose

A new apartment building wrapping around a gas station.

New York/Chelsea


Disneyland Castle 1962 by Diane Arbus

In Chelsea before the big snowfall, I went to the Richard Misrach show (see post below), and across the street, to see new photographs by Williams Eggleston and older, unpeopled, photographs by Diane Arbus. This Arbus work, though less known, has much of the same foreboding, edgy quality as her portraits. In the adjacent gallery, Eggleston’s bright saturated prints seem almost blinding after the Arbus darkness.


Photograph by William Eggleston — © Brian Rose

The Eggleston images are the usual visual nonsequiturs–often fascinating, often forgettable–inspired randomness at its best. But what does one take away from all this sniffing around? Without the history, it’s hard to imagine this work getting a show. I’m not sure if that reflects poorly on Eggleston or on the current state of our visual acuity. Whatever the case, after looking at Eggleston pictures, I end up seeing Eggleston pictures everywhere I go.


Photograph by William Eggleston — © Brian Rose


W23rd Street — © Brian Rose

New York/Chelsea


10th Avenue — © Brian Rose

After a year and a half of exposure to this virulently toxic presence, the question on the table is: In our lifetime, has there ever been a worse human being in American politics than Sarah Palin? For all the morons and criminals and bigots we’ve been subjected to, has there been anyone else who has combined all of the fetid qualities — the proud ignorance, the sadistic viciousness, the shameless hypocrisy, the arrogant laziness, the congenital dishonesty, the unctuous sanctimony, the bilious resentment, and whichever others I’m forgetting for the moment — that this morals-free harridan so relentlessly displays? (Not to mention that atonal bray with which she communicates it all.)

— Paul Slansky

New York/Richard Misrach

As a landscape photographer working in color with a view camera I have always had enormous respect for Richard Misrach. I own several of his books, and regard him as a pioneer in the field. After years of sticking to a reliable, if predictable, way of working, Misrach has recently experimented with different points of view–the beach series–and now, has begun exploring digital photography, both with camera and print.


Photograph by Richard Misrach — from On the Beach

The current show at Pace Wildenstein presents a series of large scale photographs printed as negative images, that is, inverted in Photoshop. Going to the gallery I had trepidations about the work having seen a few small images on the Internet. My first reaction on seeing the actual prints, however, was that I found them seductively beautiful, especially at such a size. And I was not troubled by the trick of inverting the images.

Since leaving the gallery, I’ve been having second thoughts, and I’ve gone back and forth on my opinion of the validity of the “the trick.” It’s not that this kind of thing is unheard of in the history of the medium. On the contrary, such experimentation has long been a part of the development of photography from Man Ray to recent color enhanced views of the surface of Mars.


Richard Misrach show at Pace Wildenstein — © Brian Rose
Mouse over for effect, click through to larger image.

Looking at my snapshots of the exhibit I began thinking that the prints were essentially inverted versions of typical Misrach scenes of the American west, no more, no less. The inversion gave them an otherworldly appearance, but really, they were less strange once the initial disorientation wore off.

And then suddenly I thought, what if I flipped the images in Photoshop. What would they look like? First, I inverted whole snapshots, but then just the images within their frames. The startling result can be seen by mousing over the snapshots posted above and below.


Richard Misrach show at Pace Wildenstein — © Brian Rose
Mouse over for effect, click through to larger image.

I’ve decided, for the moment, that I prefer the more abstract images because they are less recognizable as landscapes, but I’m still wrestling with the whole thing. As gorgeous as the prints are, I’m more and more convinced that the negative effect is too much a Photoshop product, a passing infatuation with digital wizardry. Very simplistic wizardry at that. And I’m put off by the press release language: Misrach’s newest pictures – the majority of which are made entirely without film – mark a radical shift from his past work and herald a new era in photography’s history.

Entirely without film. Wow.


Richard Misrach show at Pace Wildenstein — © Brian Rose
Mouse over for effect, click through to larger image.

I still really love the image of stars in motion, the first picture one sees entering the gallery. The sky is white and the streaking stars are black. And I like the “Pollock” evocation above, which is disorienting without being inverted. It’s positively a positive.

New York/Columbia University


Knox Hall, Columbia University — © Brian Rose

Assignment work photographing Knox Hall at Columbia University for the architects. Aside from shooting the lobby, classrooms, and various offices, I photographed the geothermal well system in the basement. The four wells are 1,800 feet deep and the system heats and air conditions the building reducing energy consumption by 50 or 60%. Here is a somewhat technical explanation of how it all works.