This is central Amsterdam, the canal belt, “grachtengordel” in Dutch, still functional despite the intimacy of the streets and architecture. Fashionable (gentrified), full of shops, people on foot, on bikes, and a Tesla quietly slithering through. The composition echoes the great Gustave Caillebotte street scene of Paris in the Art Institute of Chicago. Paris is, […]

At the end of the F train, I made my way a few blocks north to the boyhood home of Donald Trump, former president of the United States. On a street lined with tidy Tudor bungalows, the yard in front was choked with weeds, and a sign said, “Do not remove kittens from the property.” […]

This is an image from my ongoing series “Last Stop,” documenting the neighborhoods at the ends of all the subways lines in New York City. While many of the lines terminate in far-flung extremities of the city, a number of them end in Manhattan, like this one, the last stop of the L train at […]

The tentative title of my current project is “Last Stop” – as in “Last Stop on this train. Everyone, please leave the train.” I am photographing the neighborhoods around the ends of each subway line in New York. I am not the first who has done this, apparently, but I have no doubt that I […]

Old Tree by Pamela Rosenkranz, alien, yet a symbol of nature in the heart of the urban landscape. Its branches evoke the arteries of the body – it pulses. Magenta/red, the opposite color of green, an emphatic visual punctuation mark surrounded by the vestiges of industrial New York now supplanted by the glass towers of […]

I had the distinct honor last night to introduce Mitch Epstein as the recipient of the August Saint-Gaudens Award, which is given each year to a living Cooper Union school of art alum. The award ceremony was held in the Rose Auditorium (no relation, but somehow appropriate), in the new academic building on Third Avenue […]

The shoreline of the Lower East Side was once an irregular geography of creeks and inlets and marshland. That natural landscape was transformed into a sawtoothed row of docks with adjacent warehouses, factories, power plants, and tenement housing. Then Robert Moses, master planner, tore it all down and extended Manhattan onto landfill in the East […]

Happy New Year! Looking forward by looking back to May 24, 1983, the 100th anniversary of the Brooklyn Bridge. After photographing the Lower East Side, I was only then attempting to get started as a professional photographer. The Rouse Company, the developer of the South Street Seaport, hired me to document some of their ongoing construction […]

I just saw the Anselm Kiefer exhibition at Gagosian on West 24th Street in Chelsea, and I used the opportunity to bring my camera and add to my ongoing project photographing the High Line and its surroundings. Kiefer has long figured into my way of thinking about landscape and architecture. I became aware of his […]

The Cube Building, Second Avenue and East 1st Street, 1985 and 1987 – © Brian Rose The Cube Building Things got so bad in the 1980s that the city began offering buildings to developers for $1. Of course, the offer came with conditions, but imagine anything in New York going for a dollar today. The […]

Gray’s Creek, Surry, Virginia My father was born and raised in Isle of Wight County, Virginia. He and my mother were married in Portsmouth, and after my sister and I were born, moved to Richmond and then Williamsburg, Virginia, just off of Jamestown Road. The distance between my father’s birthplace south of the James and […]

I would not be an artist were it not for the experience of seeing Weekend by Jean Luc Godard. I was a student at the University of Virginia, floundering, not sure which way to go. Afraid that my choice of majors – urban design – would lead me into a life behind a desk tinkering […]

My mother used to say that we were from broken-down aristocracy, but I had no idea what that assertion was based on, and I basically did not believe her. I had zero knowledge of my family ancestry – my mother fled an abusive home at 16 years of age, and as a result, her side […]

Broome Street 1980 – © Brian Rose / Edward Fausty I have now completed phase one of rescanning the images from the Lower East Side project. The 1980 pictures – about 500 of them – have all been digitized at high resolution. Ed Fausty and I did these pictures over the course of a year […]

I wrote Cities on the Aerial Paths of Communication in 1990. It is about the fall of the Soviet Union but seems appropriate now – tragically. After the 1917 Russian revolution, artists, writers, and architects sought to build a new utopian society. This era of creative freedom was intense but short-lived, and by the 1930s, […]