The New Museum under construction on the Bowery
Back in New York after a less than smooth re-entry. I forgot my keys and cell phone, and by a miracle was able to get my assistant Chris to meet me at my apartment with his set of extra keys. The weather has been beautiful since arriving, and I got out with my camera for another walk through the Lower East Side. I began close by on the Bowery. More pictures to come…
Our apartment in Amsterdam
There are a number of things I will miss leaving Amsterdam, but none more than this apartment in the building called the Silodam, which was designed by the Dutch architects MVRDV. It sits on an earthen pier, also called the Silodam, projecting out into the Amsterdam harbor.
Double height office/studio
Pictures of the building here.
The Ij (Amsterdam harbor) at sunrise
Robert Altman, the filmmaker died today. Ever since I began seriously pursuing photography I’ve been greatly influenced by movies–perhaps just as much as by still photography–and Altman is one of the American directors I’ve most admired. I can’t remember what movie of his I saw first. It could have been M*A*S*H or McCabe and Mrs. Miller. The latter featured the songs of Leonard Cohen, another artist who I greatly admire. It was Nashville, however, that really captivated me stylistically with characters moving in and out of frame, overlapping dialogue, and crisscrossing storylines. Later on, I was terribly enamored of Shortcuts, his adaptation of Raymond Carver short stories, a seemingly impossible task. Like Nashville it weaves together stories that are otherwise seemingly disconnected. Although my photography is not so much about people’s narratives, Altman’s landscape of random juxtapositons is the same one I wander across with my camera.
If all goes according to plan we will be leaving the Netherlands in a month and a half. Since 1993 I have been flying back and forth between Amsterdam and New York, all the while trying to maintain both a fine art and professional architectural photography career. It has not been easy.
Amsterdam (4×5 film)
In the beginning the Netherlands offered a fresh start, a new relationship, and a chance to broaden my horizons. As a transplanted New Yorker, however, I found my new home baffling, contradictory, and most definitely not the progressive land of tolerance so widely touted around the world. To explain this conclusion requires going through a litany of complaints, mostly trivial, but cumulatively overwhelming. I won’t do that now.
It’s getting late in November and the days are growing short, the sun is low in the sky when it does show itself in this mostly dreary climate. It’s almost time for Sinterklaas to arrive on his steamboat from Spain accompanied by his Black Petes. The Dutch cling tenaciously to the iconography of Sinterklaas: the severe bearded man dressed in Catholic bishop’s attire, the black-faced afro-wigged Petes cavorting about. It’s a children’s thing, but it is promoted with what seems an almost manic enthusiasm by adults. To outsiders interlopers like me who cannot get past the racist imagery of Black Pete, the whole business is repellent–and in bad taste. It is cultural heritage as kitsch–not a uniquely Dutch phenomenon, of course–but especially egregious.
Sinterklaas and Black Petes (not my photograph)
Trinity Church Yard, 1981 (4×5 film)
I’m in Amsterdam, but my thoughts these days are across the Atlantic.
On January 25, 1981, 52 Americans who had been held hostage in Iran for 444 days returned to the United States. New York City Mayor Edward Koch invited them all to a ticker-tape parade in Manhattan, offering them free hotel rooms and airfare for two. On January 30, approximately two million New Yorkers turned out to welcome them home. Twenty-three former hostages took part in the parade. They traveled in open cars up Broadway from Battery Park to City Hall, where Koch welcomed them and presented them with the keys to the city and the City Council’s Proud City Award. The Sanitation Department estimated that 971 tons of paper were thrown.
–Cynthia Blair, Newsday
Berlin, 1989 (4×5 film)
I read this morning in the New York Times that former East German spymaster Markus Wolf died yesterday, 17 years to the day of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Wolf epitomized the romantic image of the Cold War spy, especially as portrayed in John Le Carré’s novels. While the Cold War was commonly seen as an epic battle between good and evil, Wolf occupied the shadowy realm of moral ambiguity. He and his counterparts in the West played a game, albeit a dangerous one, of spy vs. spy. Huge bureaucracies on both sides of the Iron Curtain jockeyed for advantage using shreds of information–the fact and fiction culled from wiretaps, satellite photographs, and undercover agents.
It is important today to remember that despite all the detail of information gathered and analyzed, the CIA and other intelligence agencies failed to foresee the end of the Cold War before it all unraveled in 1989 with the opening of the Wall and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union. The spies got it wrong then, just as they got it wrong recently in the runup to the war in Iraq. In the end, the intricacies of the game tend to obscure clear facts on the ground, and the prism of politics distorts and corrupts.
Lenin bust at the Soviet embassy, Berlin, 1990 (4×5 film)
When I photographed the landscape of the Iron Curtain back in the ’80s I sensed that the Cold War was reaching its denouement, though I had no idea that it would end so quickly. Over the course of a lifetime one has moments of prescience that are often not acted upon and go wasted. This was one time I seized the moment and stayed with it as history unfolded.
My photographs of the Iron Curtain can be found here. (website)
A song I wrote about spies at the end of the Cold War can be listened to here. (mp3)
And another about the fall of the Soviet Union is here. (mp3)
Brooklyn Bridge, 1983 (4×5 film)
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Declaration of Independence, 1776
Pulling down statue of King George III, New York City, July 9, 1776
I posted this on the 4th of July earlier this year. Here it is again.
The following song is loosely based on the Declaration of Indpendence. Lines taken or adapted from the original text are highlighted. The recording was done straight to computer without any benefits of a recording studio. But the quality should be listenable to most ears. Please feel free to share the lyrics and sound file.
declaration
in the course of human events
these truths betray a liar
red rockets glare our flag still there
over baghdad nights afire
the tyrant king usurps the throne
lets slip the dogs of war
terror thrown a useless bone
to settle obsolete scores
pull the statue down
watch it tip fall and shatter
break his phony crown
and his cronies tumble after
let facts be submitted to a candid world
the chaos of shock and awe
a long train of abuses
he refuses his assent to laws
a shadow state perpetual war
mercenary corporations
complete the works of death
tyranny and desolation
pull the statue down
watch it tip fall and shatter
break his phony crown
and his cronies tumble after
tramped on dragged through
a prison of earthly delights
strip searched and naked
certain unalienable rights
morning light frozen height
the blinding gates of hell
declare the causes which impel
the day the towers fell
pull the statue down
watch it tip fall and shatter
break his phony crown
and his cronies tumble after
throw the gauntlet down
our lives our sacred honor
© Brian Rose
Barentszplein near our apartment
It’s been gloomy here the past few days, and despite finally shaking my jetlag I remain listless and unmotivated. I walked my son to school this morning, and I passed the store window above. Mmm…
Nah. I just have to make it through to Wednesday when, hopefully, my home country will begin the long road back to sanity.
The Ij
Flew back to Amsterdam after a productive two and half weeks in New York. The apartment here, the view–unfortunately the Netherlands has not offered much work or spiritual sustenance for me–and soon we may be moving to New York full time. Since I’ve been back the weather has been tempestuous with wind, rain, and hail. The skyscape of Holland. That’s what I have from the balcony of our apartment.
A few posts back I wrote about photographing the 6th and B Garden, a lush tangle of trees and flowers on the corner of East 6th Street and Avenue B. A paradox of these community gardens sprinkled all over the Lower East Side–but particularly between Avenue A and D where the worst abandonment in the neighborhood was–is that most of them are dense thickets of vegetetation, not really open spaces at all. In a sense, they echo the forest of richly decorated tenements around them, though not the regimentation of the rows of buildings. Aesthetically, they are chaotic, however lovingly tended, and express the civilized anarchy that brought them into being in the first place.
Urban wilderness at East 6th and Avenue B
The most striking thing about the 6th and B Garden is the tall wooden structure festooned with various found objects. I couldn’t find the name of the person responsible for this famous folly, but a photograph on the garden’s website referred to it as “Eddie’s sculpture.”
Last nght there was heavy rain and wind, my ceiling leaked (an ongoing saga), and when I went out this morning I came across a half-block long sidewalk shed that had been blown down probably as the result of an advertising banner acting as a sail. As I posted further down, we should be issued hard hats in this neighborhood there is so much construction.
Temple Emanu-El and 4×5 camera
The weather brightened as the day wore on, and I dashed uptown to do a last photo for my Temple Emanu-El assignment. I stood on the corner of 65th and 5th Avenue for an hour waiting for traffic and sun. It’s a busy corner because 65th is one of the few streets that crosses Central Park. Clouds swooshed across the sky, and the best moments were probably when weak sunlight filtered through the clouds. At this time of the year, the sun is low, and the trees in Central Park are still relatively full. So, direct sunlight is patchy and never illuminates the whole building. I then walked to the Apple store down the street and purchased a Wacom tablet, a versatile replacement for a mouse when working in Photoshop.
Dr. Strangelove on Mulberry Street
I snapped this on the way home from the subway.
The Bowery (for my friend Art)
Everyday when I leave my apartment just off the Bowery on Stanton Street I have to navigate through the construction chaos of the New Museum. I’ve photographed this before with my digital camera, the red painted plywood and the blue netting. There’s so much construction in the neighborhood that the city should issue hard hats to the residents. You pick your way through this red and blue tunnel as steel beams are hoisted overhead during the day and Bowery street denizens weave and slumber at night. PEDESTRIANS THIS WAY. So, you follow and suddenly find yourself confronted by Christy Turlington in red–it’s the Bono campaign to raise money for AIDS–sitting in the lotus position, oblivious to the clang of steel and shouted epithets of the iron workers, oblivious to the huddled figures, the last of the Bowery bums, soon to be outnumbered by the bright shiny people come to see new art at the New Museum. And confronted yet again by a photograph by Annie Leibovitz, the most famous iconographer in the world.
Finally beginning to print the portfolio images that I scanned some time ago: New York, Amsterdam, Berlin. The basic size for carrying around is 20×24 inches, but some will be much larger at 40×50. The picture above shows one of the big ones from the Amsterdam series.
Printing at Color Space Imaging
For those interested, most of the scans were done on an Imacon–a high end scanner–but I am now working with an inexpensive Epson V700 with stunning results. The 40×50 above was made from one of the Epson scans.
Temple Emanu-El
I spent two days photographing the Temple Emanu-El on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Although the main sanctuary of Temple Emanu-El is impressive because of the sheer volume of uninterrupted space, highly detailed mosaics and intricately patterned ceiling painting compete with the large architectural gestures.
Chapel ark and mosaics
Adjacent to the sanctuary is a smaller chapel featuring Moorish arches and columns. The gem-studded ark, mosaic arch, and Tiffany window above, are spectacular.
Chapel from organ loft
I climbed up to the organist’s loft and framed a shot of the chapel’s chandeliers through one of the cuttouts in the wall. It’s my “Casablanca” shot I told the architect from Beyer Blinder Belle, the firm that led the restoration of the temple. The main sanctuary is open to the public, and tours of the synagogue are also available.
Official temple website
nyc-architecture.com
View southwest toward the rose window (4×5 film)
Last week I photographed the Temple Emanu-El on the Upper East Side. Two long days of shooting. It’s an extraordinary building completed in 1929 displaying a dizzying mix of architectural styles including Gothic, Romanesque, Moorish, and Byzantine. But above all, it is an Art Deco building constructed at the height of that movement in New York. In its theatricality, the temple can even be compared to Radio City Music Hall finished just three years later in 1932, though its Moderne aspects are more subdued and partly obscured by other historical references.
View east toward the ark (4×5 film)
The building was largely intact when restoration was begun, but years of dirt and grime were removed to reveal the cacophany of color and pattern on the ceiling and the mosaic arches surrounding the arks in the main temple sanctuary and the smaller adjacent chapel. More photographs to come.
Been busy the last few days photographing Temple Emanu-El on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The largest synagogue in the world, so I hear. Pictures coming.
I spend a great deal of time navigating about town by subway and on foot, which is often the speediest way to go–but one is exposed to all the frenetic chaos of the city in the process. One of the quintessential New York experiences is the relative solitude of sitting alone in the back of a taxi cab watching the world go by. It’s particularly evocative at night. Here are a few random snapshots from my cab, yesterday, heading uptown.
Midtown, New York City
Midtown, New York City
Midtown, New York City
CBGB, The Bowery and Bleecker Street, 2005 (4×5 film)
Last night I walked by CBGB, the final night of the club that helped launch punk rock and bands like Television (a favorite of mine), Talking Heads, the Ramones, and poet/performer Patti Smith. Just last year the Bottom Line, another legendary music club on E4th Street, closed its doors. Fortunately, there are still clubs and cafés on the Lower East Side and over in Brooklyn, but one wonders how long Manhattan will continue to function as an incubator for new art made on a shoestring by those living at the margins of society. It will, of course, remain the focus of those who have already arrived with its many theaters, concert halls, and museums.
I have my own story about coming to Manhattan to go to art school, finding an apartment in the East Village for $50 a month, and discovering the various underground scenes that sustained those of us pursuing art and music. Much was possible because of the cheapness of living spaces. Even the wild west frontier of vacant lots, abandoned buildings, and the real danger of crime offered inspiration or motive for a lot of creativity. I guess I am a bit more sanguine about these things than some of my friends who see the changes as evidence of the decline of western civilization.The Lower East Side is still an amazingly vibrant place, though cleaner, more expensive, less wide open. I count myself lucky to be here, just two blocks from the now-closed CBGB.