JOURNAL • BRIAN ROSE

Prinsengracht near the Noodermarkt, Amsterdam (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose

Almere, a suburb of Amsterdam (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose

I’ve been doing some renovation of my website portfolio. The two pictures above are from a major upgrade of my Amsterdam on Edge series.

From the accompanying text:

For 15 years I lived in the center of Amsterdam, the famous urban village of canals and bicycles. It was a great life style environment, but it did not interest me much as a subject for photography. What could I add or subtract from this idyll of urban seamlessness? Even the red light district appeared tame, and cozily contained. But I eventually found rougher edges of the city along stretches of the once bustling waterfront, and I discovered the new neighborhoods on the periphery, the playgrounds of Dutch planners and architects. This was clearly where the action was.

The first photograph was taken in the old canal district of Amsterdam and sets the stage for an exploration of the city that few visitors ever see. American tourists–especially–have a grossly distorted image of the city. It is both better and worse than the clichéd image most hold onto–infinitely more interesting and complex. Forget the drugs and prostitution meme. It’s tiresome, and blinds one to the what is really going on.

The second photo was taken in Almere, a new town in the polder, drained land, on the outskirts of Amsterdam. Although the landscape of the Netherlands is notably horizontal, punctuated by windmills and church spires, urban development tends to be vertical. Not tall as in skyscrapers, but narrow lots and skinny buildings standing shoulder to shoulder with exaggeratedly steep stairs, even in the newest houses. The Netherlands has plenty of planned sprawl, but it is denser than the typical American suburb. And although you see more historic architectural references these days, many of these communities flaunt their cutting edge design, theme parks of the new, as it were, even as they fulfill the most plebeian function as middle class shelter.

Amsterdam on Edge

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I mentioned a few months ago that I was expecting the Museum of Modern Art to acquire two of my photographs. It is now official. The acquisition committee approved the purchase. This is not the first time I have sold prints to the museum. They have previously acquired images from my Lost Border/Iron Curtain series. But, I am pleased that they have now added more recent work from Berlin and Amsterdam.

Mauerstrasse, Berlin (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose
From the series Berlin: In from the Cold

Since the Wall came down I have been returning to Berlin every couple years looking at developments in the former border zone, and venturing beyond to places and themes that resonate with my earlier work. Berlin, while having undergone two waves of rebuilding–first after World War II, and then after the Cold War–remains a city of scars, of vacant land and rough edges, in which history is laid bare.

In the photograph above, the layering of eras, architectural styles, materials and objects, conspire in an almost bewildering jumble. The location is but a few steps away from Checkpoint Charlie and the trace of the former Berlin Wall. As I was walking around the area, I discovered an opening to an inner courtyard–a Hinterhof, common in Berlin–and came across this scene.

There are any number of ways I approach things as a photographer. Sometimes, the subject–a building or object–demands to be respected as is, as opposed to being integrated into a willful composition. It is the composition. One of the things I’ve learned from my experience as an architectural photographer is that sometimes–often, perhaps–one has to remain subservient to the subject. And as an artist/photographer I realize that it is not necessary, nor is it advantageous,  to attempt to reinvent the medium each time I set up my camera and release the shutter.

There are also times when the subject is illusive. It may be contained in the inchoate envelope of a space, or found in the interstices of a barely recognized structure. For me, the spacial world is always a multidimensional reality, not simply a compositional layering of one thing upon another. I see things rather as a matrix, a situation comprised of any number of anecdotal or accidental relationships. The photograph above is that kind of image. In simpler terms, it’s about how all that stuff hangs together visually–about nothing–and about something essential that defines, in this case, Berlin.

Jewish Cemetery, Amsterdam (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose

For 15 years, while living in Amsterdam, I photographed the changing periphery of the city and its less determined edges. I call the series Amsterdam on Edge, which expresses not just the physical location of the photographs, but the psychological condition of a society deeply unsure of its identity and its future in a  multicultural Europe.

In exploring the outskirts of the city, I often took trams to their end points, or drove to obscure areas along the freeways. One unexpected discovery was a Jewish cemetery bisected by a train viaduct and hemmed in by a freeway and high-tension power lines. Many of the gravestones were marked Westerbork, the name of the camp that served as a way station en route to Auschwitz and other Nazi camps. Nearly 90,000 Jews, more than 10 percent of the population of Amsterdam at that time, were killed.

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14th Street and 8th Avenue — © Brian Rose

Without comment.

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More photographs from my Amsterdam on Edge series made between 1992 and 2007.

Amsterdam (4×5) — © Brian Rose

New plans for the Bijlmer, a troubled neighborhood built from scratch in the ’70s, in a passageway beneath a train viaduct.

Amsterdam (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose

In the south of Amsterdam alongside the same rail line, advertising signs convey social messages.

Amsterdam (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose

Ijburg, the latest new neighborhood in Amsterdam.

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Sloterplas, Amsterdam (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose

Continuing with new scans of the Amsterdam On Edge project I did during the 15 years I lived in Amsterdam. The photographs were made mostly on the periphery of the city, or its rougher inner edges.

South of Amsterdam (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose

Almere (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose

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Continuing to work on my Amsterdam on Edge portfolio. These are new scans of view camera work done while living in Amsterdam from the early 90s up to three years ago. None of these have been printed before. The greenhouse photograph was previously unprintable because of damage done to the film in the sky area. Easily fixed in Photoshop. Almere is a satellite city of Amsterdam about 30 minutes from the city center, and Amstelveen lies to the south.

Amsterdam (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose

Almere (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose

Almere (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose

Amstelveen (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose

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Almere Buiten  (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose

Amsterdam (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose

I’ve been scanning my Amsterdam on Edge negatives, pictures of the periphery of Amsterdam taken during the 15 years I lived in the Netherlands. Most of the prints I have of that work were made conventionally in the darkroom, and many were frustrating to print because of uneven processing done by the labs I used at that time in Amsterdam. There aren’t many places in New York I’d trust for c-41 processing these days either.

I still like the look of C prints for the work I do, but I don’t do any more straight darkroom prints. I scan the negatives and work them up in Photoshop, and then print them at a rental lab, or upload them to Adorama Pix, which does a serviceable job. They use Kodak Endura, which is high quality archival paper. I am essentially using their machine to print out what i’ve already done on my computer.

The image above was taken in Almere, a satellite city of Amsterdam. It’s one of the grand experiments of Dutch urban planning, a completely new city of over 100,000 people built on reclaimed land. It is also something of an architectural theme park where anything goes–at least it can seem that way. Almere, for all its density, has a suburban feel to it, and since its beginning in the 1960s it has been attractive to young families seeking a dream house away from the frictions of urban life. It is now a stronghold of Geert Wilders’ right wing anti-Muslim party.

My wife grew up there, and when I moved to the Netherlands in the early 90s her parents still lived in Almere. They have since moved to Amsterdam and they have a house on the coastal island of Texel. Places like Almere just don’t have the cultural diversity of Amsterdam, and even finding a decent restaurant remains hopeless. Once the kids grew up, they moved out.

Amstelveen  (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose

Amsterdam (4×5 film) — © Brian Rose

After World War II, the Netherlands engaged in a vast rebuilding that has gone on for decades. It was a new start inspired by idealism and the belief that a better society could be consciously created and cultivated. As a result, the Netherlands has become one of the most prosperous places in the world. But in recent years, a pall has hung over this prosperity. As the world became smaller, the Dutch have found themselves increasingly a multicultural society with all its accompanying problems. The incandescent confidence that suffused Dutch politics and planning in the 90s when I arrived gave way to an erosion of confidence in the great national project, the polder model, as it was called, and a confusion about Dutch identity and culture.

That’s the context for my Amsterdam on Edge series, a project I have never adequately presented or had an opportunity to exhibit. Although I have an Amsterdam page on my website, it needs a better presentation and the inclusion of a number of new photographs–like the ones above. The Netherlands remains a conundrum for me–progressive yet deeply conservative, cosmopolitan yet overtly parochial. It is one of the best places for architecture in the world. Photographers are doing great stuff these days. I met lots of terrific people. But the cultural extremes gave me whiplash and left me stranded between countries unable to find a niche in their midst.

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Back in New York, an overnight two day shoot of interiors at a golf club in the Hamptons. Then scans, color correcting, and delivery to the client. A busy week. Monday, of course, marked the fifth year since the destruction of the World Trade Center, and I was happy, in a way, to be busy with other things. I did, however, take the time to post a picture of the Twin Towers taken in the 1980s that when enlarged in Photoshop revealed the scratched signature of Phillipe Petit the French street performer who tightrope walked between the towers in 1974. It’s currently in the Outtakes section of my homepage.

My son gave me the this drawing a while ago depicting the Twin Towers and me with my camera. He was too young to have any memory of 9/11, but much to my amazement he seems acutely aware of the importance of the event, and its importance to me personally.

Here are some more digital pictures of the Haarlemerbuurt (neighborhood around the Haarlemerdijk in Amsterdam) taken last week. Scroll down for earlier pictures.

Haarlemmerdijk

Moroccan food store, Haarlmmerdijk

Haarlemmerdijk

Bickerseiland

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