The Lost Border
I encourage you to visit The Morning News site to view a series of 12 photographs by Brian Rose entitled The Lost Border. The photographs span the period from the 1980s through 2004 and show various images of the former border between East and West.

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Working for 19 years on the fringe of the Iron Curtain, photographer Brian Rose captured the landscapes of central Europe with Bruegel’s sensitivity for how a setting tells a story. A conversation about his work, and a gallery of photos from his odyssey.

As a child I was an admirer of John F. Kennedy and I was aware of his trip to Berlin shortly after the Wall was erected. That was his famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech. I remember air raid shelters and duck and cover drills in school. Though I had a pretty serene childhood, the turmoil of the ‘60s and the Cold War had pretty big impact on me. My introduction to photography was Life magazine and the National Geographic, two periodicals my family subscribed to. I saved a copy of National Geographic with pictures of the Berlin Wall from the late ‘60s—I still have it—and almost 20 years later I made the subject my own....

I remember seeing Wim Wenders’s Kings of the Road in which two people travel along the East/West border. That’s the quintessential European road movie, freedom constantly being constrained by borders.

After reading Anthony Bailey’s account of his travels along the Iron Curtain in the New Yorker magazine, I decided to begin the project. I took a German language class, bought a plane ticket, rented a car, and traveled for five weeks. I had no idea it was the beginning of a 19-year odyssey....

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