BIOGRAPHY I was born in Portsmouth, Virginia, and grew up in Williamsburg, the restored 18th century town. In 1977 I went to New York to attend Cooper Union, where I majored in photography, and studied with Joel Meyerowitz, Larry Fink, Richard Pare, and Jim Dow. While in school I began writing songs and hanging out at various music clubs and cafes in Greenwich Village. It was there that I met other aspiring songwriters such as Suzanne Vega, Jack Hardy, David Massengill, John Gorka, and Shawn Colvin. In 1982 I was the co-founder (with Jack Hardy) of the Fast Folk Musical Magazine, a record/magazine promoting new songs and songwriters. During
the 80's I concentrated much of my attention on photography, documenting
the streets and landscape of the city. I photographed the
Lower East Side in 1980, and the Wall Street area of Lower Manhattan
in 1981. Shortyly afterwards I began photographing Central park, and
I became the first photographer for the newly formed Central Park
Conservancy. I also photographed Prospect Park, and various other
wild or uncultivated park areas around the city. In 1985, I turned
my attention away from the city and began to photograph along the
former Iron Curtain border and the Berlin Wall. That project, which
I have continued to work on since the opening of The Wall and the
collapse of the Soviet Union, has been exhibited in several one-man
shows, and prints from the series have been collected by the Metropolitan
Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art. In 2004, after years of
effort, my Iron Curtain photographs were published by Princeton Architectural
Press as The Lost Border, the Landscape
of the Iron Curtain.
Since the mid-80s I have worked as a professional architectural photographer. My photographs have appeared in magazines such as Architectural Record, Interior Design, and Metropolis. An early relationship with Architecture magazine gave me the opportunity to photograph buildings of note by Philip Johnson, James Stirling, and Cesar Pelli. More recently, I have photographed the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht by Aldo Rossi and the Fortis building in Rotterdam designed by Helmut Jahn. In 2002 I photographed the Silodam in Amsterdam by the Dutch architects MVRDV. Currently, I work regularly for TPG Architecture (the Philips Group) and TEK Architects in New York, and David Baker + Partners in San Francisco. After
a few years away from music, I once again began writing and performing
songs. In 1991 I recorded an album simply titled Brian Rose.
The music runs from full band arrangements, produced by Suzanne Vega,
to spare acoustic guitar and violin. I have since recorded a collection
of my songs entitled Skeletons in my Closet. That
collection and Brian Rose can be downloaded for free
from my website. In 2002, I recorded my song "The Skyline"
for the Suzanne Vega produced Vigil
project, songs by New Yorkers since September 11th.
In
1993 I married Renee Schoonbeek, a Dutch urban planner. I travel frequently
between New York and Amsterdam. Recently I have been photographing
the landscape on the periphery of
Amsterdam, and beginning in 1997 I began photographing along Broadway
in Manhattan from the Battery to the Bronx. In the summer of 1998
I published Mercatorplein, beeld van een wereld in Amsterdam
(Mercatorplein, Image of a World in Amsterdam), a portrait of
a neighborhood in transition, and in 2000, California
Dreaming, which features photographs of housing in the San
Francisco Bay Area. I have also returned to photographing the Lower
East Side of Manhattan, retracing my steps from 1980. That work
has yet to be exhibited, but the ongoing project can be seen on my
website.
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