Born in Virginia, Brian Rose moved to New York City in 1977 to attend Cooper Union. He studied with photographers Joel Meyerowitz and Larry Fink, the painter Jake Berthot, conceptual artist Hans Haacke, and art historian Dore Ashton.

In 1980, he and fellow Cooper graduate Edward Fausty photographed the Lower East Side of Manhattan, supported by a New York State CAPS grant, and later participated in a photographic survey of the Financial District, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts.

In 1985 Rose began photographing the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall. That project has continued to the present, chronicling the fall of the Wall and the rebuilding of Berlin. His book The Lost Border, The Landscape of the Iron Curtain was published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2004.

From 1993 to 2007 Rose lived in Amsterdam in the Netherlands. In 1998 he photographed the Mercatorplein neighborhood with its immigrant population and Amsterdam School architecture. That work, supported by the Netherlands Architecture Fund, was published as Mercatorplein, Image of a World in Amsterdam.

Since the mid-2000s Rose has been re-photographing the Lower East Side, documenting the rebuilding of the World Trade Center, and maintaining a photography weblog. In 2012 his book Time and Space on the Lower East Side was published by Golden Section Publishers.

Rose's images have been collected by the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He lives in New York with his wife, urban planner Renée Schoonbeek, and his son Brendan, who at age 4 made the drawing at left--his father with camera--and the Twin Towers.