Painter, Virginia — © Brian Rose

We headed down to Virginia for the holiday to see my father who lives in Williamsburg. Instead of subjecting myself to 8 hours of stressful interstate driving I decided to take the Eastern Shore route, which took us through the farming areas of the Delmarva peninsula. We stopped a few times for pictures along the way.

Painter, Virginia — © Brian Rose

Painter, Virginia — © Brian Rose

Lots of God, country, and guns in these parts. Also, beaches, crabbing, truck farming, poultry–even a NASA research facility.

Williamsburg, Brooklyn — © Brian Rose

Tis the season.

La Mama gallery, E1st Street — © Brian Rose

The large Lower East Side print I made for my exhibition in Brooklyn last summer, is now hanging in a group show at La Mama gallery on E1st Street between the Bowery and Second Avenue. It’s a holiday exhibition featuring friends of La Mama, the pioneering theater located on E4th Street, the block where I used to live.

I had a nice chat with Howard Guttenplan the director of the Millenium Film Workshop, also on 4th Street, who had a photo collage in the exhibit. Millenium has been around for forty years promoting independent cinema, particularly art and documentary films.

The exhibition at La Mama is a grab bag of stuff of differing levels of accomplishment. It’s meant to be an inclusive show. The opening was well attended, nicely catered, and I was very pleased with how my photograph looked on the wall. Now, if only I can find a home for it when the show comes down.

The last–probably–of the 4×5 film scans of from my recent trip to Berlin. I shot about 60 sheets of film, so there’s lots to work with. Some of these are similar to digital pics posted earlier. When things get reduced to 72 dpi, the difference between the 4×5 scans and the images made with my pocket camera can seem minimal. But I think these have greater clarity, and more presence somehow. Obviously, when printed, the difference is huge.

Alexanderplatz (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose

Alexanderplatz (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose

A fascinating exhibition about the political resistance that undermined the DDR regime–and other East European countries–and helped lead to the fall of the Wall in 1989. The American and western perspective, in general, is so oriented to Cold War geopolitics, that this side of the story is almost completely ignored. It is a profound misrepresentation of history, and exhibits like this, bit by bit, offer a much needed corrective.

Niederkirchnerstrasse (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose

Berlin Wall marker with push button audio commentary.

Vossstrasse (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose

One of the many scaffold buildings around Berlin. Some of them depict buildings to be rebuilt or reimagined, and others are simply giant canvases for advertising. A Microsoft Windows ad was on the the front side of this one, which formed part of the former, and future, streetwall of Leipziger Platz.

Topography of Terror (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose

Brandenburg Gate (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose

Cameras in position on December 8th, for the following evening’s event celebrating the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Lafayette Street — © Brian Rose

Without comment.

Beekman Tower seen from Water Street — © Brian Rose

The Lower Manhattan skyline lost a great deal of its iconic power when the Twin Towers, soaring above everything else, were destroyed in 2001. Even before that, the slender early to mid 20th century towers were robbed of their elegance by bulky monoliths closing off the gaps of sky between. No longer like a spiky seismograph, Lower Manhattan’s profile from many angles became a solid wall of glass and masonry.

There is a building under construction, however, that will significantly alter the visual dynamic of the downtown skyline. Designed by Frank Gehry, Beekman Tower, situated near the open space of City Hall Park, has already established itself as a clear punctuation mark on the horizon. It is an exceptionally tall, relatively thin, tower. For good or ill, depending on your perspective or vantage point, it interacts visually with the filigreed spire of the Woolworth Building and the stone/wire yin and yang of the nearby Brooklyn Bridge.

Beekman Tower — © Brian Rose

The skin is now about a third of the way up, undulating silvery waves, accentuating the extreme verticality of the structure. That’s something the pinstripes of the Twin Towers did–if banally. Beekman Tower will never dominate the skyline like the World Trade Center, then or in the future. But Gehry’s “No Viagra” (his words) erection downtown will be one of the few postwar skyscapers that join company with the Empire State Building and Chrysler in providing a sense of urban thrill, and unabashed New York bravado.

Unter den Linden (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose

This is a 4×5 scan of an image seen previously. The grassy field is the site of the former Palast der Republik, East German government/cultural center. And before that, it was the site of the 18th century Stadtschloss, seen printed on fabric in the rear. The idea is to rebuild the facades of the older palace.

DDR Museum (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose

The East German palace is gone–but not forgotten–and its glass facade has also been printed on fabric, hung on the structure of the temporary DDR Museum. There are such printed scaffold buildings all over Berlin.

DDR mural, Leipziger Strasse (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose

Very real is this mural in the former air ministry building, which was dates back to the early days of the German Democratic Republic. Here’s some information from Wikipedia:

In 1950-52 an extraordinary 18 meter long mural was created at the north end along Leipziger Straße, set back behind pillars, made out of Meissen porcelain tiles. Created by the German painter and commercial artist Max Lingner together with 14 artisans, it depicts the Socialist ideal of contented East Germans facing a bright future as one big happy family. In fact the mural’s creation had been a somewhat messy affair. Commissioned by Prime Minister Otto Grotewohl, Lingner had had to revise it no fewer than five times, so that it ultimately bore little resemblance to the first draft. Originally based on family scenes, the final version had a more sinister look about it, a series of jovial set-pieces with an almost military undertone, people in marching poise and with fixed, uniform smiles on their faces. Lingner hated it (as well as Grotewohl’s interference) and refused to look at it when going past. With a degree of irony, the building became the focal point a year later of the Uprising of 1953 in East Germany.

East Side Gallery (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose

I’ve only got a few more scans to work on from my recent trip to Berlin. The photograph above was the last piece of film I shot, and shows a bit of the remaining stretch of wall called the East Side Gallery near the Ost Bahnhof in former East Berlin. The Wall along here was painted on by various artists shortly after the Wall opened up in 1989. The image of Mstislav Rostropovich performing in front of the Wall at the center of the photograph is not one of the original paintings–but I like it.

Near the Brandenburg Gate, Berlin (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose

Novevember 9, the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Wall. This was as close as I got to the ceremony at the Brandenburg Gate. I stood for an hour in a cold steady rain with my view camera, managing to take two photographs. I like the balloons. Everyone was just waiting for the dominoes to fall, which they did a couple of hours later, well behind schedule. By that time I had retreated to a warm dry place to watch on TV.

Still more 4×5 scans to come.

The Brandenburg Gate (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose

Wilhelmstrasse (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose

Continuing with 4×5 film images from the week of the 50th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Both of these were seen earlier in digital camera versions. The two pictures above key on what has become the universal symbol of the old DDR (East Germany), the Trabant. The top one is from a PayPal commercial that ran repeatedly on the big screens between Potsdamer Platz and the Brandenburg Gate, and the bottom one is from the Trabi Safari where the now vintage cars are for rent.

Here the balloon appears slightly ominous, the world untethered, floating out of control.

E82nd Street — © Brian Rose

No.

Bring them home.

Metropolitan Museum, Diana in the American Wing — © Brian Rose

Presided over by Diana, the former weather vane atop Madison Square Garden, by Saint-Gaudens, the renovated Engelhard Court of the Metropolitan Museum is a bustling atrium of fleshy marble and bronze unabashed in the presence of families with frolicking children and everyone snapping pictures or sagging in exhaustion among the ferns beneath a stone pulpit suffering an imaginary preacher’s admonishments.

The Metropolitan, American Wing — © Brian Rose

Metropolitan Museum– © Brian Rose

Frank Tedesso in the Metropolitan Museum of Art — © Brian Rose

After leaving (staggering out of) “Looking in: Robert Frank’s The Americans” at the Met, I stood for a moment by a Rodin statue pondering the exhibition–another photography exhibition where no photography was allowed. Robert Frank’s pictures were a searing burn of visual truth made at a time when voices were silenced by blacklists and guilt by association. It took courage to make art in the ’50s, perhaps, but if you were unknown or underground enough, maybe it didn’t really matter. In the end, Frank’s dark–though beautiful–vision of America surfaced, and changed forever how we saw ourselves, and how we viewed and made photographs.

I snapped a few desultory shots of a poster directing the hordes of museum goers to the start of the exhibition. It had on it the famous photograph of a New Orleans streetcar with those unforgettable faces. And then, materializing out of the crowd, a face I knew, someone who is as fine an heir to the tumbling poetry and prose of the Beats I know, the songwriter and poet Frank Tedesso. Here’s a bit of one of his song lyrics:

it’s raining in tibet,
all of the holy men are getting wet
it’s only snowing on my street,
but my heart is melting away from me…
There’s a madman up in the attic
stompin’ the blues in his chains
he sings my songs, he wears my clothes
he answers to my name
love me because i am crazy’
as crazy as you are beautiful
love me because i know forever
runs through me and you
and these flesh and bones
de flesh and de bone
is that the holy ghost on the saxophone
sometimes a man has the need to roam
to roam from these flesh and bones

Go here to hear some of his songs.

82nd Street and Fifth Avenue — © Brian Rose

As I wandered out of the museum, and breezed down 82nd street snapping pictures on my way to the subway, it struck me how self-conscious photography has become since the time of Robert Frank’s intuitive exploration of the country. We seem always to know where we are going and what we will find when we get there. Even serendipitous moments have a calculated predictability. Street photography has a staged quality, and staged photography has subsumed the idea of spontaneity.

Blossfeldt photos– © Brian Rose

A short trip out of the city to Wilton, Connecticut. Thanksgiving pies and a grid of Karl Blossfeldt photographs.

Potsdamer Platz (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose

Three images not shown earlier when blogging from Berlin. This one made at Potsdamer Platz, a TV boom and control booth, an image of joyous Germans climbing on the Wall in 1989, and trompe l’oeil buildings and scaffolding ads behind on adjacent Leipziger Platz.

Checkpoint Charlie (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose

A crude reconstruction of the 1961 checkpoint shed with sandbags and lights–never there in the historical photos I’ve seen. Tourists pose with fake American soldiers who wave the flag around cavalierly. Haus am Checkpoint Charlie museum is across the street and to the right. An image of a Soviet soldier on the left is an art piece by Frank Thiel. The other side shows an American soldier.

Watchtower/memorial (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose

Günter Litfin memorial, first victim of the newly erected Berlin Wall. A remaining guard tower surrounded by post 1989 housing.

Berlin Wall dominos, Ebertstrasse (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose

Continuing to scan and work on my recent Berlin images.

Similar to the digital view in an earlier post, this one features the man at right, who connects visually across the frame to the face of Stalin on the left. These cloudy sky pictures take a bit of work in Photoshop since the sky has to be lower in contrast than the rest of the image. Sometimes it can be done by selecting areas, but often I put the sky on a separate layer and flatten at the end.

Potsdamer Platz (4×5 film)– © Brian Rose

The first of the 4×5 film scanned. Compare to earlier digital snapshot below.

The day before the dominos were toppled thousands of people walked between Potsdamer Platz and the Brandenburg Gate. I was excited to be there, but a bit put off by the commercial nature of things–including corporate logos on some of the domino stones. Freedom won in 1989, but coporatism reigns in 2009.

Holocaust Resource Center & Archives, Queensborough Community College
© Brian Rose

Back into my architectural photography work, this is an extraordinary project I photographed shortly before my trip to Berlin. The design is by Charles Thanhauser of TEK Architects in New York. I’ll post more pictures later, and do a portfolio page for my website. Here is the website of the center.

Berlin under the S-Bahn — © Brian Rose

Bang Bang Club or Bang Bang Club.

I’m back in New York, and just picked up my Berlin film today.