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 […]

“Monument Avenue Richmond,” a follow-up to “In Time of Plague,” will be available soon for presales on Kickstarter. The two books share the same design elements and comprise a kind of diptych that frames the Covid-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests that overlapped each other in the spring and summer of 2020. This […]

Just heard that the photographer Paul Fusco passed away. Back in 2008, I posted the following essay about his photographs made while traveling on the Robert Kennedy funeral train. It is a powerful series of images that have always resonated deeply with me. Paul Fusco, RFK funeral train, 1968 I was 14 years old in […]

Monument Avenue: Grand Boulevard of the Lost Cause The mysteries of my family history haunt me to this day. At times I have confronted my southern heritage directly, at other times I have run from it. Tomorrow I confront. I am driving to Richmond with my son to photograph the final days of the Confederate statues […]

Jefferson Davis gravesite, Hollywood Cemetery, Richmond, Virginia – © Brian Rose I was born and raised in Virginia, and my family lived two years in Richmond. We moved to Williamsburg down the peninsula after that. I attended the University of Virginia before departing for New York where I have lived for most of my life. […]

McCarren Park, Williamsburg, Brooklyn – Covid-19 lockdown – © Brian Rose In 1981, the songwriter Jack Hardy and I created something called the Fast Folk Musical Magazine. It was a monthly album/publication that was recorded in a home studio and typed up on an IBM Selectric. The recordings were simple, unadorned, mostly first takes. The […]

Frances Goldin at City Hall with the Cooper Square urban renewal model. Within a few months of arriving in New York in 1977, I met three extraordinary individuals who influenced the trajectory of my life in profound ways. One was my professor at Cooper Union, Joel Meyerowitz, who was a pioneer of color photography. The […]

In Time of Plague is a comprehensive portrait of Williamsburg, Brooklyn made at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. I made 16 walks through the neighborhood, reaching virtually every corner of this sprawling part of the city. I have witnessed this city’s ups and downs for almost five decades – the bankrupt 70s, AIDs in […]

Peter Beard (on ladder) and Marvin Israel at ICP, 1977 – photo by Orin Langelle One of the first jobs I had in New York while attending Cooper Union was as a part-time exhibition installer at the International Center of Photography. As fate would have it the first big show I worked on was the infamous […]

I walked up the Williamsburg Bridge the other day and made this photograph. I timed it for the light and knew the spot from previous walks. Most of the bridge walkway is surrounded by a chainlink-like mesh, but there are places where you can wedge a small camera lens in between. It’s a view that […]

Williamsburg, Brooklyn – © Brian Rose Williamsburg, Brooklyn – © Brian Rose I’ve now made nine walks through Williamsburg in the past couple of weeks – basically since the coronavirus crisis took hold. There are some photographs that include evidence of the epidemic, but most do not. Although I have made photographs on rainy days, […]

Williamsburg, Brooklyn I have now made six walks through Williamsburg, Brooklyn since hunkering down with my family. Maintaining distance from others has been easy given that there are few people in the streets. It is an eerie feeling – as if I have the whole city to myself. Other than the emptiness, there are only […]

A more fleshed version of my previous post. McCarren Park, Williamsburg, Brooklyn – © Brian Rose In Time of Plague As a photographer, the concept of sheltering in place is foreign to my instincts, but here in New York, in the midst of this invisible infectious storm, we have been ordered to stay at home. […]

© Brian Rose – New York City Having done this work a long time, I’d like to make a few brief comments about what it means to be a photographer of the social landscape – in general, but especially in challenging times. We are witnesses and chroniclers of history. Not the episodic events that photojournalists document, […]

Lakeland, Florida I made a short trip down to Florida to watch my son’s college baseball team play – many of the teams in the northeast travel down south at the beginning of the season to take advantage of warm weather and get in some games. I didn’t have much time for sightseeing. No Sleeping […]

Dorothea Lange exhibit at MoMA — © Brian Rose I’ve always had a complicated relationship with Dorothea Lange’s work, and that of other “concerned photographers,” to use Cornell Capa’s oft-repeated phrase. As a young photographer, I rejected the style of photo-journalism promoted by Life magazine, and what I saw as the glib humanism of the […]

The Vessel, Hudson Yards, New York –  © Brian Rose Yesterday, a young man, 19 years old, jumped to his death from The Vessel, the iconic sculptural centerpiece of Hudson Yards on the westside of Manhattan. As with any suicide, this is a tragedy for family and friends – even those who witnessed the fall […]

East 5th Street 1980 — © Brian Rose/Edward Fausty We here in New York are greatly concerned about gentrification and its effects and have been for as long as I have lived in the city — I arrived in 1977. I am not a native New Yorker. I moved to the Lower East Side as […]