For those of you who dont know, I own a small publishing company that specializes in photographic art books. The company, Golden Section Publishers recently released Brian Rose’s book – Time And Space On The Lower East Side 1980 + 2010. This book shows many of us a time and feeling of New York’s lower east side during the Punk Era in which the lower east side was not the gentrified safe haven it is today. Brian’s work rooted in the tradition of the 70′s colorists Joel Sternfeld, Stephen Shore and Joel Meyorwitz with the ideal of the “photograph as record” that many of us have come to appreciate in the Becher’s and Walker Evans photographs. A compelling body of work by an unknown artist from that era…
In 1980, Brian Rose, in collaboration with Ed Fausty, photographed the Lower East Side of Manhattan with a 4×5 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 done 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 set of photographs 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.
Time and Space on the Lower East Side
Brian Rose 1980 + 2010
Photographs from 1980, Brian Rose and Ed Fausty
Foreword by Suzanne Vega
Golden Section Publishers, 2012
126 pp., 106 color illustrations, 9 x 11.5
