Press

Brian Rose Interview
with David Hrbek

David Hrbek: You are an architectural photographer. What is it that attracts you
to architecture?

Brian Rose: Ever since I can remember I've been fascinated by cities. As a child I drew a city on a large sheet of cardboard with streets and buildings and drove toy cars and trucks on it. As I got better at drawing, I improved the city bit by bit, taping fresh paper over the parts I wanted to replace. It became a multi-layered city, in time and space, almost like a real one.

That's what I photograph now, the urban landscape in time and space. It could be an architectural assignment or a more personal project, but it's always about the built environment. How architecture compares with the other arts remains an ongoing debate, but to me, it is a fundamental and basic expression of human civilization. I am interested in architecture at all levels, from the Parthenon to snack bars.

DH: Where were you at the moment you got to know about the terrorist attacks on the WTC?

BR: I was in Amsterdam at home. It was around 3 in the afternoon in Europe. I got a call from an American friend in Berlin who had heard the news. I turned on CNN and watched the second plane hit, and then watched the towers collapse and--so it appeared on TV--a large part of Lower Manhattan disappear. I still live part time in New York and have an apartment downtown, fortunately not too close to the WTC, and virtually all my friends live in New York. So, I was seriously upset, and depressed for a long time afterwards.

A couple of days after the attacks, I got an e-mail from Suzanne Vega with the news that our friend, the songwriter Jack Hardy, had lost his brother in one of the towers. I knew Jeff Hardy quite well. He was a bass player, and many of us in our musical circle had performed with him. He was also a talented cook, and was working in the WTC as a chef for Cantor Fitzgerald, a Wall Street firm that lost hundreds of people. A week later I was in New York and got together one evening with Suzanne, Jack, and another songwriter friend David Massengill. We talked for hours. It was important for me to be with my friends in New York at that moment.

DH: After this horrible tragedy had happened, nearly everybody all over the world was shocked. But when some time passed, quite lots of Europeans seemed to misunderstand "the wave of American nationalism". You live in Amsterdam, what was your own experience with Europeans´ attitude?

BR: I've felt caught between the two continents. I've never been a flag waver, but I felt it was natural for Americans to hang out the stars and stripes after being attacked. It goes without saying that American history and experience is fundamentally different than Europe's--American soil has rarely been touched by foreign enemies. That's why you continue to hear comparisons with Pearl Harbor. In both cases Americans woke up to a clear threat from outside. Americans tend to be overly idealistic and believe in big banner stuff like freedom and democracy while driving big cars and consuming lots of energy. They don't realize how heavy-handed they can appear to others, and can't understand why anyone would oppose them. Europeans are more realistic, no doubt about it, but lacking the powerful creation myths that define America, often misunderstand what really motivates Americans.

Things have changed since September 11th in Europe maybe even more than in the U.S. I've seen the Dutch consensus state, the polder model, as they say, dissolve into semi-chaos, a political assassination, and often shocking expressions of racism and anti-semitism. One can criticize U.S. foreign policy for tending toward unilateralism, but from my bi-continental perspective, I see western Europe becoming more insular, more concerned with protecting itself internally--keep out the asylum seekers, especially Muslims--and increasingly less willing to engage politically or militarily elsewhere.

DH: The attack has changed the Manhattan skyline. What other things has it
changed?

BR: Once you get past the obvious tragedy of so many people dying, and of loved ones who continue to suffer, I see a number of hopeful things coming out of this. People came together after 9/11, and, although, a lot of the initial openness has dissipated, I think that people feel more than ever a sense of community. And the rest of the country seems to care about New York a bit more as well. There's also a lot of talk about rebuilding New York, not just the WTC site. It's part of New York's culture to look forward rather than back, and I think that's the case even now. That said, there's the ever-present concern that the city could be struck again.

DH: Suzanne Vega collected twenty songs on 9/11 written by New York songwriters, the CD is called Vigil and your song The Skyline can be found on the list too. The first line says: The city my arrow, my compass and grid. In a personal way, what is New York to you?

BR: For many ambitious young Americans growing up in small cities or the suburbs, New York is the place to go to pursue dreams of wealth or fame, or to simply challenge oneself to go up against the best. I was no different, and given my interest in cities, I saw New York as my destiny. I went as an art student, and found friends and creative comrades very quickly. I began to photograph the city, and many of my songs dealt with New York as a place and a state of mind.

Eventually I proved to myself that I could, as the song goes, "make it there," and as time went on, the city became less central to my work. Despite my move to Amsterdam, what I discovered after 9/11, is the extent to which New York, is central to my sense of self, whether I am there all the time or not.

DH: You are a member of the Songwriter´s Exchange. Could you explain what it is?

BR: It's basically a group of people who come together once a week--usually at Jack Hardy's apartment--to play and discuss new songs. It began more than 20 years ago, first in a bar and later a café, but eventually settled into Jack's place. The idea is that you write a song a week. But whether you're that prolific or not, you can come and partake of the pasta and wine. Whenever an article is written about the Songwriters' Exchange there's the obligatory list of the famous and near famous who've come through Jack's living room. But New York is that kind of place in general. Sometimes it seems that everyone is striving for some kind of recognition.

DH: Your friend Suzanne Vega wrote her biggest hit Tom´s Diner from your view
and in some interview she mentioned you as one of her inspiration sources. Was she a kind of an inspiration to you also?

BR: When we met, I think we immediately recognized each other as kindred spirits. Suzanne grew up in New York, and she had a certain street smarts that I liked right away, and was jealous of. Her songs, while self-reflective, had an emotional and visual clarity that set her apart from most of the other writers, especially folk writers who tend towards sentimentality. We did a lot of writing back and forth, sort of friendly sparring, and we challenged each other to sharpen our creative knives. Those years when she and I and Jack were hanging out together were tumultuous, but extremely creative. The three of us drifted apart briefly around the time that Suzanne did her first album and I was concentrating on becoming a photographer. But we've remained fast friends, and she (and Jack), whatever other things I've gotten into, are still my greatest influences.

DH: In 1985 you began to photograph "the former Iron Curtain border and the
Berlin Wall". Why?

BR: That's always been a tough question for me to answer. It could have started with my boyhood admiration of John F. Kennedy who went to Berlin after The Wall went up. "Ich bin ein Berliner." Or, a copy of National Geographic magazine, with pictures of the divided city that I saved for years. Or much later, the films of Wim Wenders. Particularly, Kings of the Road (Im Lauf der Zeit), in which two disaffected men travel along the East/West border. "The Yanks have colonized our subconscious," one of them says in the film. Whatever it was, I wanted to move beyond New York as a subject, and do something that dealt with the larger issues of the day. After a number of months of research, I flew to Germany, rented a car, and began the project. I returned several times before 1989, and then photographed the disintegration of The Wall, and have since documented the rebuilding of central Berlin.

DH: You continue photographing this area up to now. Is there anything that
surprises you when you keep coming back to those places?

BR: Berlin remains a haunted urban landscape to me. No matter how much reconstruction goes on, the city does not lose its edginess like Munich or Frankfurt. It cannot be prettified and tamed. Architectural battles break out along the seams of the former division. Battles for control of history continue rage over memorials, museums, and ruins. Berlin, and what it represents, remains unresolved.

DH: In Olomouc Museum of Art you present a collection of photographs with the
WTC. How did this collection come into the light?

BR: Directly after September 11th, I didn't feel any desire to try to deal artistically with what had just occurred. In December, perhaps to counter a continuing feeling of helplessness, I began rummaging through my archive of photographs from the late '70s and the early '80s, when I began photographing New York with a view camera. I went into the darkroom and tried to print the negatives, but found that they were in bad shape, the result of poor film processing and deterioration from age. Color film was not very stable in those days. So, I scanned all the negatives and worked on the images on the computer. I worked on them for days, and was able to bring back the original color and contrast. The prints in the exhibition are all made from digital files.

What I like about these images is that they aren't really photographs of the World Trade Center as the central subject. Instead, they remind us how much the Twin Towers were a constant presence as you walked around the city. Like most New Yorkers, I didn't have particularly warm feelings about the Twin Towers. They didn't have the romance of the Empire State Building or Chrysler Building with spires reaching to the sky. But they were perfect backdrop buildings for the rest of the skyline to be seen against and to be measured by. Now that they're gone, the skyline seems to me less grand, attenuated.

Rather than images of the destruction at Ground Zero, I am happy to be showing these pictures of the city from before. Plus one image taken after, of the temporary memorial at Union Square. I realize that the photographs taken by Joel Meyerowitz and James Nachtwey, two great photographers who had access to the WTC site, needed to be made. But I worry about our obsession with these "beautiful" images of twisted steel masking the bodies of thousands of people, and I wince every time I see the crashing towers replayed on TV. I like best seeing the Twin Towers reflected, as in a pool of water, like one of the photographs in the exhibit. They will exist forever in my mind's eye.