E12th Street, 2003 (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose
From my World Trade Center book, WTC. Preview available here.
Happy New Year!
Archive for December, 2010
New York/Lower East Side
Stanton Street — © Brian Rose
Digging out today.
Please visit Reciprocity Failure for a few comments on one of my photographs. And take a look at my proposed World Trade Center book here. Let me know what you think.
Third Avenue and E5th Street — © Brian Rose
Shepard Fairey mural on the Cooper Square Hotel.
New York/Bleecker Street
Bleecker Street — © Brian Rose
Couple feet of snow and huge drifts in New York. Walking from the subway on my way to Think Coffee on the corner of Bleecker Street and the Bowery I noticed two elderly people struggling to get over a wall of plowed snow. I snapped a quick picture of the scene, and then ran over to help the couple. I reached for the hand of the woman first, and then helped the man climb across onto the street. I asked them if they needed any more assistance, and then realized that it was Robert Frank (The Americans), and his wife, the artist June Leaf. I made sure they reached the door of their loft safely. I didn’t say anything more, or photograph them–aside from the accidental image above. Got my coffee on the corner.
New York/WTC Book
Front cover of WTC — © Brian Rose
I’ve more or less finished with the first draft of WTC, my photo book about the World Trade Center. Like so much I’ve been doing lately I have no idea what the outcome of it all will be. This ought to be a “popular” book, but it’s an oblique glance rather than a series of straight on architectural views. The fact is, none of the earlier photos were ever intended to be primarily about the WTC or the Twin Towers. Only the later pictures, the ground zero views, and the found vernacular images of the Twin Towers were consciously made as such. In many ways the book is about memory and the ephemeral presence of the towers on the skyline. My favorite illustration of the Twin Towers is the New Yorker cover done by Art Spiegelman–black towers against a black background. They are barely visible.
New Yorker cover by Art Spiegelman
The book is comprised of a number of different sections corresponding to time period and camera format. The earliest pictures were made in the late ’70s on 35mm Kodachrome, the ’80s pictures were made on 4×5 film, and most of the recent ground zero photos were done on 4×5. The post 9/11 Twin Towers collection was mostly done with a digital pocket camera, either a Ricoh GR or Sigma DP1. It’s interesting to see them together in a book all printed at the same scale despite coming from drastically different file sizes.
Close up of the skin of WTC tower — © Brian Rose
To break up the parts, or chapters, of the book, I’ve made made tightly cropped images of the skin of the Twin Towers–the pin striping that made the buildings seem to shimmer or appear slightly fuzzy from a distance. These cropped images bleed to the edges of the page and act as dividers.
Close up of the skin of WTC tower — © Brian Rose
I haven’t decided whether to make the book public on Blurb as yet, but I will make it semi-public here on my blog. Take a look. Any feedback is, of course, appreciated. Be kind. I’ve put days and days into this not counting the shooting itself. Be sure to look at the full screen preview.
New York/Barclay-Vesey
Barclay-Vesey building with 1 and 7 WTC (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose
This is one of my favorite buildings in NY–the Barclay-Vesey building–one of the great Art Deco telephone buildings. I’ve photographed it before–this time, from a few months ago, with the 4×5 camera. It’s a wonderfully athletic structure doing a sort of architectural twist at the hips. Already, the 1 WTC is twice is high, and will soon fill the entire patch of sky to the right.
New York/On the FDR
On the FDR Drive — © Brian Rose/Ed Fausty
Manhattan back in 1982 had many areas that were extremely quiet, even desolate. Few people lived in lower Manhattan then, and the weekends were exceptionally still. One Sunday morning Ed Fausty and I actually walked up on the FDR Drive and took several photographs. You would not want to try that today at any time of the week.
This is a new–and dramatically improved–scan of an image on my WTC webpage. I’ll update those images once I’m finished with the new ones.
New York/Under the FDR
Under the FDR Drive, 1982 (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose/Ed Fausty
I am working on a book about the World Trade Center that spans a 32 year time period. It’s a big job pulling together all the images from my archive, scanning new images and rescanning older material. In some ways this will be a book about the ghost of an icon in the way that my Berlin pictures, post-Wall, are about something that no longer exists. The fall of the Berlin Wall–marking the end of the Cold War–led to a profound reconfiguring of world politics. The fall of the Twin Towers signaled another altering of the world order–possibly not to the benefit of the United States, which appears vulnerable as a world power since 9/11. Such opinions, of course, lie outside the scope of my photographs, though they invite the viewer to take a long view of such matters.
The photograph above, which has never been printed before, was taken by me and Ed Fausty in 1982 underneath the FDR Drive in the area of the Fulton Fish Market. We were still working together at the completion of the Lower East Side project. It was a sullen day, the sun weakly shining between the buildings. A backlit situation, the warm glow at center/left is the sun position. Very difficult to print–or in this case work up in Photoshop.
For those interested in technical things, I selected the shadow areas of the image, and worked with curves to try to coax tonal range out of what could easily turn into a black mass. Working on contrast globally without selecting can be problematic because highlight detail is easily lost. The shadow /highlight tool can be useful if handled with care. Often I anchor points on the RGB curve at either end, and push and pull in between to achieve mid-range contrast. I also used a Wacom pen to paint dark and light areas, zooming in to small pieces of the image to work at a more detailed level. There is a limit to how much you can open up shadows, and if there’s nothing there, it should stay black. In a previous post I railed against Ansel Adams and his zone system approach to printing, but I’m not opposed to the idea of achieving a full range of tonal values. I prefer, however, to work more intuitively.
You won’t be able to see this at the resolution of your computer screen, but there are about 15 people standing on the observation deck of WTC 2 to the left. Easily visible in a decent sized print–if I ever get the chance to do an exhibition.
New York/Notes in Passing
Bookthugnation in Williamsburg — © Brian Rose
From the window of bookthugnation in Williamsburg, a reminder that rewriting or distorting history using photographs predates the invention of Photoshop.
Although I still don’t have a publisher for Time and Space on the Lower East Side, the book remains available for purchase via Blurb. At the end of March I will be doing a slide talk featuring the Lower East Side book at the Midtown public library on Fifth Avenue. I’ll provide more information as the date approaches.
Despite the lack of publisher, I am working on another book, this one about the World Trade Center. Hopefully, an antidote to the kinds of books I expect to see coinciding with the 10th anniversary of 9/11.
I will post more about this soon, but I envision the book as a visual elegy, a collection of several series of images–the Twin Towers glimpsed in early 35mm slides, monumental 4×5 views of Lower Manhattan from 1982, pictures made just after 9/11 of lower Broadway and the memorial at Union Square Park, recent images of the periphery of ground zero, and digital snapshots of Twin Towers images collected since I’ve been doing this blog.
The Dakota Apartments (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose
Finally, I’d like to take note that 30 years ago today John Lennon was gunned down outside the Dakota apartment building on Central Park West. Lennon was not just my “favorite Beatle,” he was one of the people who most inspired me as a young artist–songwriter and photographer. I never had the chance to see him perform live, but once saw him walking through Central Park arm in arm with Yoko Ono.
The photograph above was, which is from my New York primeval series, was taken from within the park. The image was one of several used by the Central Park Conservancy as thank yous to benefactors. My understanding is that a print of this photograph was given to Yoko Ono when she provided the money to create and maintain the landscape of Strawberry Fields, a part of Central Park near the Dakota dedicated to John Lennon.
Strawberry Fields forever.
