{"id":8868,"date":"2023-01-01T13:24:09","date_gmt":"2023-01-01T18:24:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.brianrose.com\/blog\/?p=8868"},"modified":"2023-01-01T16:32:48","modified_gmt":"2023-01-01T21:32:48","slug":"happy-new-year-new-york","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.brianrose.com\/blog\/2023\/01\/happy-new-year-new-york\/","title":{"rendered":"Happy New Year \/ New York"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/a>
Brooklyn Bridge Centennial, May 24, 1983 \u2013 \u00a9 Brian Rose<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Happy New Year!<\/strong>

Looking forward by looking back to May 24, 1983, the 100th<\/sup> 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 work, which led to my first published assignment.

Because of my relationship with Rouse, I was able to secure a prime spot to photograph the fireworks show for the centennial celebration. There were dozens of other photographers perched along the decaying waterfront with their SLRs, motor drives, and telephoto lenses. I was down on a sandy strip of beach \u2013 the tide must have been out \u2013 with my 4×5 field camera and wide-angle lens, juggling with film holders in the approaching darkness. 

I had no idea how to go about photographing fireworks. I was just winging it. Knowing I only had about ten sheets of film to work with, I opened up the lens all the way, making sure I was focused on infinity, and tried a series of time exposures. One second, 2 seconds, 8 seconds, 15 seconds. About half of them were washed out and unusable, but I nailed it on the image above, a single projectile fired from a barge below the bridge, bursting into a perfect shower of fire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My contact at the Rouse Company put me in touch with the editor of the AIA Journal, Donald Canty, who asked if I could show him my portfolio. No websites in those days \u2013 I had to go to his office. The magazine was headquartered in Washington, D.C., so I took a train down and met with Canty not far from the White House, as I recall. 
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The magazine was looking for a photographer to shoot the Seaport. The problem, however, was that I had no portfolio other than my pictures of the Lower East Side, which were not seamless images of sleek new buildings, but gritty documents of the streets and architecture of a neighborhood and a city caught at the cusp between decline and rebirth. The images, made in color with a view camera, depicted reality in stark and vivid detail, unlike the grainy black and whites usually associated with the Lower East Side. Don Canty looked at the 11×14 prints I had brought with me, which included my Brooklyn Bridge fireworks picture, and he told me right then and there that he would hire me.

He ran the bridge image as a double-page spread in the magazine a few months later, and I went on to do numerous assignments for Canty in the 1980s.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8868","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-photogs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brianrose.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8868","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brianrose.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brianrose.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brianrose.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brianrose.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8868"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.brianrose.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8868\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8878,"href":"https:\/\/www.brianrose.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8868\/revisions\/8878"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brianrose.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8868"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brianrose.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8868"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brianrose.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}