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.

In the mid-2000s Rose began re-photographing the Lower East Side of New York. Time and Space on the Lower East Side was published in 2010. Two companion books have followed -- Metamorphosis, about the Meatpacking District, and WTC, a chronicle of the Twin Towers and the rebuilding of the World Trade Center. After the election of Donald Trump in 2016, Rose photographed Trump's legacy of failure in Atlantic City, and his book, Atlantic City, was published by Circa Press. In 2020, he photographed the last days of the Confederate statues in Richmond, Virginia, and his book, Monument Avenue was published by Circa Press.

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. His son Brendan, now in his 20s, made the drawing at left when he was 4 -- his father with camera -- and the Twin Towers.