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, […]

Andre Volten studio in Amsterdam Noord – © Brian Rose In the late ‘90s, I was commissioned to photograph the neighborhood surrounding Mercatorplein, a public square, in Amsterdam. It was an area in the west of the city created to house ordinary working families, but over the years, a homogeneous Dutch population had given way […]

Robert E. Lee, Monument Avenue, Richmond – © Brian Rose As the city of Richmond dismantles the pedestal that once supported Robert E. Lee high above Monument Avenue, the grand boulevard of the Lost Cause, the news comes that Charlottesville has made a decision about their Lee statue, presently in storage. According to the Washington […]

In the research I’ve been doing of my family roots, I continue to make astounding discoveries, sometimes sobering. Many of my Virginia ancestors were slaveholders, that is clear. On my father’s side of the family, one of my third great grandfathers is Arthur Crumpler. Googling his name I found another Arthur Crumpler, whose father was […]

We had a very nice Thanksgiving yesterday with friends from overseas. We had a traditional turkey dinner, though not with a bird anywhere near the size of Norman Rockwell’s amazing levitating monster in “Freedom from Want.” I am reminded of the time a group of students from my high school, a Catholic school in Virginia, […]

W19th Street, NYC – © Brian Rose Just before the pandemic hit, I was working on a project about the High Line and its surrounding urban landscape in Manhattan. Not wanting to take the subway during the spring of 2020, I began shooting my neighborhood of Williamsburg in Brooklyn. When the George Floyd demonstrations broke […]

Today, the Robert E. Lee statue in Richmond came down. My book, Monument Avenue, documents the brief moment when protesters took possession of the Confederate statues along the grand boulevard of the Lost Cause. The Lee statue was the centerpiece of the ensemble of statues arrayed along Monument Avenue, and with a broad grassy circle […]

2020 was for most of us a traumatic year of pandemic and protest culminating in the defeat of Donald Trump in November. Directly after election day, we waited nervously for the media to make the call for Joe Biden. Rudy Giuliani held a press conference in Philadelphia at the Four Seasons – it turned out […]

Brian Rose 1974 Virginia Roots I am a New Yorker, a self-identification that presupposes the likelihood that one may have come from somewhere else, from another state, or from anywhere in the world. My work as a photographer and musician emerged from the rubble and creative ferment of New York City in the late ’70s […]

Louise Rose, Portsmouth, Virginia, 1957 Since my mother passed away on January 16th, I have spent more time with the scrapbook she left behind that documents her work in the fight against polio in the mid-1950s. It is a remarkable collection of articles and letters that pieced together provides a narrative of events leading to […]

McGraw-Hill Lobby, West 42nd Street, NYC – © Brian Rose A great crime against culture and architecture has been commited by the owners of the McGraw-Hill Building. The magnificent Art Deco lobby designed by Raymond Hood has been destroyed. https://w42st.com/post/art-deco-lobby-mcgraw-hill-tower-demolished-landmark-commission-feckless/

Brooklyn Army Terminal – © Brian Rose A month ago in the midst of a snowy February, I made the trek down to the Brooklyn Army Terminal to receive the first of two Covid-19 vaccines. I was eligible at 66 years of age and eager to get vaccinated. It took some doing – repeatedly logging […]

150 Varick Street, NYC – Brian Rose and Berenice Abbot In 2009 I had an assignment to photograph the Hudson Square neighborhood of lower Manhattan. Hudson Square was once known as the Printing District because of the large number of printing businesses that occupied the massive loft buildings along Hudson and Varick Streets just north […]

After a horrendous early spring, the pandemic began easing in New York, but the overall mood remained tense, much as it had been during the past three years of the Trump presidency. On May 25th, in Minneapolis, George Floyd was murdered by police officers while under arrest. The killing set off a wave of protests […]

2020 has been an extraordinary year, to say the least, and it is not over yet. Despite all the derangement and turpitude of Trump, and despite the Covid-19 pandemic with its toll of death and social isolation, it has been a productive time for me as an artist and photographer. This period of time actually […]

Four Seasons Total Landscaping, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – © Brian Rose Trump’s campaign began with the candidate regally gliding down an escalator in his eponymously named tower on Fifth Avenue in New York, and his bid for re-election ended, so to speak, with a bizarre Rudy Giuliani press conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping in northeast […]

A very nice write-up about Monument Avenue Richmond in Architects + Artisans. But they’re all symbols of a mindset that’s no longer credible. “The statues were erected after the Civil War, in a period of denial,” he says. “It certainly felt like this was a historic moment and needed to be documented. ”Rose had been in […]

When I made the trip down to Richmond at the beginning of July to photograph the last days of the Confederate statues on Monument Avenue, I had mixed feelings about their impending removal. I was, to some extent, under the mistaken impression that these pompous generals on horseback were merely cartoonish caricatures from the past […]