New York/Early Color


Richmond, Virginia, circa 1975, 35mm Ektachrome

I’ve been looking back at my early color images made mostly on 35mm slide film. Although I was vaguely aware of work being done by Eggleston and a few others, I was pretty much making things up as I went along.

This picture was made in Richmond, Virginia in the older part of downtown–Main Street near the train station most likely. I was particularly interested in compositional density in those days.

New York/Inspiring Space

This blog has been a little quiet lately, but I’ve been busy with a few photo shoots, reorganizing my studio, and meeting with people about the Lower East Side project. It’s too early to say anything specific, but there is reason to be hopeful that there will be a major exhibition of the LES pictures in the foreseeable future


The New Museum in Inspiring Space

One of the people I met with recently is Ethan Swann of the New Museum, which is located around the corner from my apartment/studio. Ethan is heading up an initiative of the museum called the Bowery Artists Tribute, which is an educational and community outreach program having to do with the rich cultural heritage of the Bowery and surrounding neighborhood. There is a website with a map and bios of many of the artists, past and present, who have lived or worked in the area.


Pages from Inspiring Space

A few weeks ago I attended a panel discussion at the museum, sponsored by the Bowery Artists Tribute, featuring several artists talking about how they ended up on the Bowery, and how the surroundings may have influenced their work. Ethan has a great job, part of which consists of patiently listening to people like me rambling on about life and art on the Bowery. And I think it is admirable of the museum to open itself up to the local community.


Bowery images, Inspiring Space

Back in the summer I made photographs for a Dutch publication called Inspiring Space, which is basically a promotional vehicle for a large real estate firm in the Netherlands. I worked with a journalist and put together a series of pictures about new park, cultural, and environmental projects currently underway in New York. The magazine can be read online–although the article is in Dutch–and 10 of my photographs are presented. Part of the article discusses the New Museum as a catalyst for change on the Bowery, and two of my Bowery/Houston Street photos are included.

New York/Rodger Kingston


Rodger Kingston nails a door (digital)

A while back, when the weather was still warm, I was paid a visit by Rodger Kingston down from the Boston area. Rodger and I met online–somehow that doesn’t sound right–and have been corresponding regularly.

We spent a few hours walking around the Lower East Side, and Rodger snapped away using his wide format Lumix camera. It’s territory I’ve covered extensively using a 4×5 view camera, and it’s interesting to see how differently another photographer looks at the same subject.

Rodger often goes at things very frontally using the extended frame of his camera to its fullest. I caught Rodger in the act above firing away at a flaming doorway. He was kind enough to send me the result below.


Flaming door by Rodger Kingston

I didn’t take as many pictures during our walk as Rodger, but I felt I compelled every now and then to follow his lead. One result below.


Bowery restaurant supply with door
© Brian Rose

Be sure to visit Rodger Kingston’s SmugMug site to see more of his photographs including others shot during our walk together. Don’t miss his New American Photographs and recent photos made in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in the footsteps of Walker Evans.

New York/Yankee Stadium


Yankee Stadium under construction (digital)
© Brian Rose

Went up to the Bronx to scout a building for an upcoming photo shoot. The 4 train goes up by Yankee Stadium, and I got out and did a couple of snapshots of the nearly completed new stadium. The old edifice still stands across the street, but it will soon be dis-Mantled and de-Ruthed.


Yankee Stadium under construction (digital)
© Brian Rose

I’m not sure about retaining the neoclassical facade of the original stadium, though I don’t think a techie steel and glass approach would make sense here in the Bronx. What I do like is that the stadium will, like the old one, remain a building on the street hugging the elevated subway. Not a stadium machine, like so many others. Glimpses of the field will still be possible from the windows of the passing trains, and a replica of the famous frieze will wrap around the upper deck. My understanding is that it is essentially a modern stadium inserted into the envelope of a more traditional exterior.


Bronx apartment building entrance. (digital)
© Brian Rose

The new stadium, designed by HOK Sport echoes the design of the original ballpark, but it has a more monumental feel, cleaner, but with deeper cut arches. Although it doesn’t reflect Art Deco, the dominant Bronx style, it does remind me of other monumental buildings of that era, like 30th Street station in Philadelphia, which manages to incorporate both classicism and deco design. My guess is that it will wear well here on 161st Street. Fans will gather on the plaza as before, and the nearby bars and souvenir shops will flourish as always. And the ghosts of Mantle and Ruth will hover a while in confusion, but eventually decide that new stadium is nicer, and has better restrooms, among other amenities.

New York/Astor Place


Astor Place (digital)
© Brian Rose

The photograph above shows how bikes tend to be parked in New York. Usually, the only option is a signpost or light pole. Every now and then, one finds the repeating U shape rack as seen to the left. Not always with three bikes, one of them upside down.

Having lived in Amsterdam for 12 years–while traveling back and forth to New York–and married to a Dutch urban planner, I feel I can comment with some level of authority on the issue of bike racks. The Netherlands, as is well known, is among the most bicycle-oriented places in the world, but even there, they continue to struggle with the problem of parking and storing thousands and thousands of bikes on the city streets.

The Dutch attach their bikes to anything sturdy including light poles, signposts, bridge railings, fences, you name it. Bike racks, too. A quick image search on bike racks in Amsterdam produces dozens of different designs, mostly incredibly complicated and impractical. Despite the apparent riot of different designs, the official bike rack for central Amsterdam is a simple bent piece of metal shaped like a staple. There are no photographs of them on the Internet, presumably because they are so uninteresting. Unobtrusive is a virtue in my opinion.


Astor Place (digital)
© Brian Rose

The Bloomberg administration has actively promoted bicycle use in New York City, creating bike lanes, and in some cases, segregated bike paths along major avenues. The city has just completed a design competition for what will become the standard bike rack used throughout the five boroughs. Prototypes of the 10 finalists were mounted on the traffic island in Astor Place–the one with Alamo, the famous black cube sculpture by Tony Rosenthal.


Astor Place (digital)
© Brian Rose

Good for sitting on.


Astor Place (digital)
© Brian Rose

Good for tripping over.


Astor Place (digital)
© Brian Rose

Not bad.


Astor Place (digital)
© Brian Rose

Looks good with this bike.


Astor Place (digital)
© Brian Rose

Almost.


Astor Place (digital)
© Brian Rose

Brendan, my son, leaning on the wittiest of the bunch, modeled after a steel cable bicycle lock.


Astor Place (digital)
© Brian Rose

The winning design, “Hoop,” by Ian Mahaffy and Maarten De Greeve, based in Copenhagen. It’s one of the simplest of the designs, can be used singly or in groups, parrallel to the curb when the sidewalk is narrow, and perpendicular when there is more space. Those commenting to the article on the New York Times website are all concerned about how it can be securely attached to the pavement. I think the round shape gives people the impression that it just grazes the surface of the sidewalk. But imagine a steel post beneath the wheel at the point where it touches the ground. It should be at least as sturdy as the traffic signposts already used by most cyclists.

It’s elegant, flexible, iconic. I like it.

New York/Joel Sternfeld


Joel Sternfeld exhibition at Luhring Augustine, New York (digital)
© Brian Rose

A month ago I took in Joel Sternfeld’s exhibit at Luhring Augustine in Chelsea. The work shown—the Oxbow Archive—is a series of pictures of a square mile of farm, field, and woodland, along the Connecticut River, made over a year’s time, ordered by date. The full set of 77 photographs is available in a book of the same name.


View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts,
after a Thunderstorm—The Oxbow, 1836, Thomas Cole,
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The landscape depicted in Sternfeld’s series was famously painted by Thomas Cole in 1836 in all the idealized grandeur of the Hudson River School. Sternfeld, rather than mount the nearby heights like Cole, stays close to the muddy ground.


August_19_2006 • Joel Sternfeld • The Oxbow Archive

It is a landscape held, for the moment, in a cautious equilibrium. Tractors leave their imprints in the soft soil among the swaying cornfields. Weeds and puddles of water luxuriate beneath changing skies, as often dull and clouded as sunny and radiant. The fields alternate between cultivated and fallow.

As in Sternfeld’s earlier pictures of the High Line in New York City, the persistence of nature springs forth everywhere despite the taming influence of the plow and other man made incursions. The smallest gestures of tangled growth are carefully described by the view camera—even celebrated. Visual events are carefully, but gently, noted in passing: a flock of sleeping geese in a field, a curled up raccoon (dead or alive?), an abandoned campfire, a toppled tree, clumps of withered cornstalks in a field.

There is no text in the book, though there is a gallery press release that emphasizes the political and social critique offered by Sternfeld’s work, especially in relation to his earlier visual essays on American utopian communities and global warming. These new images fit within the continuity of Sternfeld’s work going back to the more acerbic and ironic pictures of American Prospects. But there is something about these images that resonates on a different level–something personal or spiritual–expressing the culmination (at this stage) of a long career of looking and thinking deeply about the world we live in.


Mohonk Mountain House • New Paltz, New York (digital)
© Brian Rose

Recently, I traveled with my family up the Hudson River to the Mohonk Mountain House with its fairy tale hotel nestled in the mountains near New Paltz. And I thought about Sternfeld’s photographs as I hiked around and climbed Sky Top for the views of the surrounding countryside. The resort dates back to the 19th century and its siting in the landscape arrayed with rustic pavilions and rocky pathways embodies the romantic concept of nature expressed by Thomas Cole and his compatriots. Some of the same ideas can be found in Olmsted and Vaux’s great urban parks and private gardens. Nature majestic, yet tamed by man–if not by actually constructing upon the land, then by framing it, aestheticizing it.


Romantic Landscape with Ruined Tower, Thomas Cole, 1832-36
Albany Institute of History and Art


Smiley Memorial Tower, Mohonk Mountain House (digital)
© Brian Rose

Rustic tower on the promontory of Sky Top overlooking the surrounding Hudson River valley and Shawangunk Mountains.


The Barn Museum at the Mohonk Mountain House (digital)
© Brian Rose

Mountains framed by rocks and trees. Nature sublime, but ordered.


November 29, 2006 • Joel Sternfeld • The Oxbow Archive

For many years photographers embraced the notion of framing the landscape for heroic or picturesque affect. But it has been a long time since serious photographers have taken that approach. Sternfeld doesn’t bring a wholly new way of seeing to the task of photographing the Oxbow. He builds his visual case methodically, image by image, day by day, season by season. He treads the same ground over and over, follows the same paths repeatedly, revisits familiar fields, ponds, glades, the same briar patches. Systematic becomes meditative and vice versa. What emerges eventually is a comprehensive experience of time and space.


March 13, 2006 • Joel Sternfeld • The Oxbow Archive

When I first looked at Sternfeld’s Oxbow images, their stillness seemed absolute. But out of that silence I began to hear sounds off camera–the crunch of the photographers boots on crusted snow, the snap and crack of twigs and branches, the sibilance of wind through leaves. And then, the growl of a distant tractor, the drone of an approaching plane, the white noise of nearby Interstate 91. I began to sense the encroaching proximity of civilization in these unpeopled images.

When I greeted Joel Sternfeld at the exhibit opening back in September I told him that these were, perhaps, his most beautiful photographs. His response was that he felt that he was born to do this work. Whatever the presumed message of this project, environmental or political, I see the Oxbow Archive, ultimately, as a search for an ineffable nexus–a muddy path leading into an unknowable and uncertain future.

New York/Rockefeller Center


Rockefeller Center and St. Patrick’s Cathedral (4×5 film)
© Brian Rose

The architectural photography I do tends often to be corporate interiors, very often in Midtown Manhattan. Most of the time I shoot after hours when the office workers have gone home. If possible I get a couple of shots just before sundown, when the light turns blue, and the inside and outside are relatively balanced. But after that, the windows go black and reflect the brightly lit florescent interior. The city outside almost disappears.

Recently, I was shooting in a 1960s wedding cake building at 51st and Madison, so called because of the multiple setbacks required at that time by zoning regulations. There were doors from some of the offices leading out to a narrow terrace formed by the stepping of the facade. From the terrace I saw a stunning view of Rockefeller Center seen across the spires of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Near the end of the shoot–1am or so–I took my view camera out on the terrace and did the image above. Two minute exposure, little wind.

New York/Koudelka


Invasion 68 Prague, Photographs by Josef Koudelka at Aperture Gallery (digital)
© Brian Rose

A few posts back I wrote about 1968 and Paul Fusco’s photographs of the Robert Kennedy funeral train. Currently, at Aperture Gallery in Chelsea, is another exhibition dealing with 1968–Josef Koudelka’s photographs of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, which brought to a brutal end what is known as Prague Spring, a fleeting period of blossoming freedom behind the Iron Curtain.

The exhibition features a series of images made by Koudelka over the course of one week when Soviet tanks entered the Prague and were confronted by (mostly) young protesters in the street. Koudelka was just starting out as a photographer, and these pictures represent a spontaneous response to unfolding events–events that he was a part of–even as he remained unflinchingly faithful to the narrative of what was happening all around him. As a result his images do not exhibit the stylized framing that one sometimes associates with the genre. There is a fluidity to them. Although certain compositions achieve dramatic effect, more often they are part of a flow of images, almost filmic in nature. And they remind me, a little, of the direct cinema of the ’60s when documentary filmmakers participated in events as silent witnesses.


Koudelka at Aperture Gallery (digital)
© Brian Rose

Although the photographs show the bravery of the Czech people standing up to tanks and machine guns, heroism ultimately gives way to the futility of flesh and blood against the mechanized armor of the invaders. Koudelka’a images of swirling crowds pause here and there to capture the faces of Czech citizens and young foreign soldiers. Eventually, peaceful confrontation devolves into violence–fire and smoke rise from the streets. And the Czechs were defeated.

As much as one wants to celebrate the emergent skill of Koudelka, the bitter and gritty beauty of his photographs, the ultimate lesson of these images is that freedom is fragile and can be swiftly obliterated. It would be 21 years before a new Velvet Revolution emerged on the streets of Prague.

The Aperture exhibition is comprised of new inkjet prints, made from high resolution scans, which have a richness and texture different from silver prints and allow for large blow ups. Although I appreciate the qualities of vintage prints, I generally approve of these kind of reprintings, which often enhance and reveal detail and subtlety inherent in the images. Things can go wrong, of course, but in the right hands, the results can be stunning. They are here.

New York/New Paltz


Mohonk Mountain House (digital)

A few days away from the city, we are at the Mohonk Mountain House near New Paltz, New York, up the Hudson River. This is the classic view of the historic lake and hotel, a Catskill retreat that dates back more than a hundred years.

It was cool and foggy this morning, but has brightened up considerably. Fall colors are vivid.