New York/Good Bye to Blogger

Blogger/Google is dropping its support for ftp blog publishing next month. For those of us wishing to keep our photographs and other files on our own server that means migrating to a new platform--WordPress.

So, here goes nothing. Hopefully nothing.

New URL: http://www.brianrose.com/journal/

New York/Chelsea

Disneyland Castle 1962 by Diane Arbus

In Chelsea before the big snowfall, I went to the Richard Misrach show (see post below), and across the street, to see new photographs by Williams Eggleston and older, unpeopled, photographs by Diane Arbus. This Arbus work, though less known, has much of the same foreboding, edgy quality as her portraits. In the adjacent gallery, Eggleston's bright saturated prints seem almost blinding after the Arbus darkness.


Photograph by William Eggleston -- © Brian Rose

The Eggleston images are the usual visual nonsequiturs--often fascinating, often forgettable--inspired randomness at its best. But what does one take away from all this sniffing around? Without the history, it's hard to imagine this work getting a show. I'm not sure if that reflects poorly on Eggleston or on the current state of our visual acuity. Whatever the case, after looking at Eggleston pictures, I end up seeing Eggleston pictures everywhere I go.


Photograph by William Eggleston -- © Brian Rose


W23rd Street -- © Brian Rose

New York/Chelsea

10th Avenue -- © Brian Rose

After a year and a half of exposure to this virulently toxic presence, the question on the table is: In our lifetime, has there ever been a worse human being in American politics than Sarah Palin? For all the morons and criminals and bigots we've been subjected to, has there been anyone else who has combined all of the fetid qualities -- the proud ignorance, the sadistic viciousness, the shameless hypocrisy, the arrogant laziness, the congenital dishonesty, the unctuous sanctimony, the bilious resentment, and whichever others I'm forgetting for the moment -- that this morals-free harridan so relentlessly displays? (Not to mention that atonal bray with which she communicates it all.)

-- Paul Slansky

New York/Richard Misrach

As a landscape photographer working in color with a view camera I have always had enormous respect for Richard Misrach. I own several of his books, and regard him as a pioneer in the field. After years of sticking to a reliable, if predictable, way of working, Misrach has recently experimented with different points of view--the beach series--and now, has begun exploring digital photography, both with camera and print.


Photograph by Richard Misrach -- from On the Beach

The current show at Pace Wildenstein presents a series of large scale photographs printed as negative images, that is, inverted in Photoshop. Going to the gallery I had trepidations about the work having seen a few small images on the Internet. My first reaction on seeing the actual prints, however, was that I found them seductively beautiful, especially at such a size. And I was not troubled by the trick of inverting the images.

Since leaving the gallery, I've been having second thoughts, and I've gone back and forth on my opinion of the validity of the "the trick." It's not that this kind of thing is unheard of in the history of the medium. On the contrary, such experimentation has long been a part of the development of photography from Man Ray to recent color enhanced views of the surface of Mars.


Richard Misrach show at Pace Wildenstein -- © Brian Rose
Mouse over for effect, click through to larger image.

Looking at my snapshots of the exhibit I began thinking that the prints were essentially inverted versions of typical Misrach scenes of the American west, no more, no less. The inversion gave them an otherworldly appearance, but really, they were less strange once the initial disorientation wore off.

And then suddenly I thought, what if I flipped the images in Photoshop. What would they look like? First, I inverted whole snapshots, but then just the images within their frames. The startling result can be seen by mousing over the snapshots posted above and below.






Richard Misrach show at Pace Wildenstein -- © Brian Rose
Mouse over for effect, click through to larger image.

I've decided, for the moment, that I prefer the more abstract images because they are less recognizable as landscapes, but I'm still wrestling with the whole thing. As gorgeous as the prints are, I'm more and more convinced that the negative effect is too much a Photoshop product, a passing infatuation with digital wizardry. Very simplistic wizardry at that. And I'm put off by the press release language: Misrach’s newest pictures – the majority of which are made entirely without film – mark a radical shift from his past work and herald a new era in photography’s history.

Entirely without film. Wow.


Richard Misrach show at Pace Wildenstein -- © Brian Rose
Mouse over for effect, click through to larger image.

I still really love the image of stars in motion, the first picture one sees entering the gallery. The sky is white and the streaking stars are black. And I like the "Pollock" evocation above, which is disorienting without being inverted. It's positively a positive.

New York/Columbia University

Knox Hall, Columbia University -- © Brian Rose

Assignment work photographing Knox Hall at Columbia University for the architects. Aside from shooting the lobby, classrooms, and various offices, I photographed the geothermal well system in the basement. The four wells are 1,800 feet deep and the system heats and air conditions the building reducing energy consumption by 50 or 60%. Here is a somewhat technical explanation of how it all works.

New York/West Village

Leroy Street -- © Brian Rose

Without comment.

New York/Brooklyn Heights

Plymouth Church, Brooklyn Heights (4x5 film) -- © Brian Rose

On a recent assignment, I photographed Plymouth Church for the magazine America's Civil War. This was the church where Henry Ward Beecher, the famous abolitionist preacher, delivered his sermons. Beecher's sister was Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, the best selling anti-slavery novel. Abraham Lincoln sat in one of the pews at right listening to Beecher the day before his Cooper Union speech, which helped propel him to the White House.

Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.


Abraham Lincoln by Matthew Brady

Lincoln was originally supposed to give his speech at Plymouth Church, but as I was told by the church historian, Brooklyn was deemed too difficult to get to for the invited dignitaries. The Brooklyn Bridge was not constructed until 1883. So, the location was changed to Cooper Union in Manhattan. On his way to Cooper, Lincoln stopped in Matthew Brady's studio at Bleecker and Broadway and had his portrait taken. Brady later documented the Civil War, and his photographs remain some of the most powerful depictions of war ever made.