NYAB Event - Brian Rose Exhibition

Brian Rose Exhibition

Dillon Gallery

This event has ended.

In 1980, Brian Rose, in collaboration with Edward Fausty, photographed the Lower East Side of Manhattan with a 4x5 view camera. It was the neighborhood’s darkest, but most creative moment. While buildings crumbled and burned, artists and musicians came to explore and express the edgy quality of the place. For more than two decades that work sat unseen in Rose’s archive as he went on to other projects, most notably his long-term documentation of the landscape of the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall.

After the wrenching events of 9/11, Rose was drawn back to New York as a subject for his camera. He began thinking about making a response to what had happened to the city, one that would take a longer view of the impact on New York and beyond. Eventually he decided to return to where he had begun— the Lower East Side— the place where so many Americans traced their roots. The old neighborhood tucked beneath the bridges, lying at the feet of the pinnacles of power, would serve as a barometer of change and continuity.

From the outset it was clear that this would not be a simple before/after take on the place. While keeping an eye on the earlier photographs made with Fausty in 1980, Rose sought to rediscover the place with fresh eyes, with the perspective of time, change, and history.

The result, Time and Space on the Lower East Side, is a book and a set of images that looks backward and forward, that posits the idea that places are not simply “then and now,” but exist in a continuum of decay and rebirth.

In the photograph East 4th Street, 1980, a stickball game is played under colorful fluttering bits of cloth hung between looming tenement walls receding into the distance of the city's unending grid. It is an image expressive of freedom and the timelessness of youth constrained by the dense architectural space of New York.

Suzanne Vega writes in the foreword to Time and Space that Rose's work "records the bones of the times we have lived in, by which I mean that spirits have passed through the streets and worn away some of the edifices. Some of the shapes against the sky have changed, especially since 9/11. And the fashions of clothing, the graffiti, the expressions of the spirit are fluid and they change. But beneath all of this, is the structure, the architecture, the unyielding scaffolding of this vibrant and dirty corner of New York City."

Brian Rose came to New York in 1977 to attend The Cooper Union where he studied with photographers Joel Meyerowitz and the filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker. His book, The Lost Border, The Landscape of the Iron Curtain, was published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2004. Rose’s photographs have been collected by the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He lives and works in New York City with urban planner Renée Schoonbeek and his 14-year-old son Brendan.