The Lost Border: The Landscape of the Iron Curtain

Rivers slash across snow-covered tundra, barbed-wire fences partition desolate fields and graffiti-covered walls divide the land in Rose's powerful pictorial. Both structure and symbol, the Iron Curtain in this photographic record captures the physical and ideological separation between Europe and the former Soviet Union. Rose traces the Wall's path through Austria, Hungary and Italy, as well as the lands once called East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. Understandably, the bulk of this photo-history focuses on Berlin during its division and after its reunification. Using the Brandenburg Gate as an exemplar of change, Rose first shows the structure half-hidden behind a high wall smattered with graffiti, yet clearly visible are East German flags against a crisp blue sky. In contrast, a photo taken more than a decade later sets the Brandenburg Gate against a similarly vibrant sky, but this time the image evokes intimacy. The white-walled boundary and the warning posters have been replaced by families and tourists, and a half-finished building and enormous construction cranes bespeak progress. Beautifully photographed and richly reproduced, this photographic record pairs industrial and homey images with Rose's musings about the sights and his experiences capturing them on film. He doesn't offer much by way of interpretation, but the photos speak for themselves. In one shot a woman stands on a desolate road truncated by wire mesh that's blocking access to the West and all that it represents, and in another, a handful of crumbling, graffiti-covered concrete slabs stand wearily, waiting to be taken away. This is an intelligent, eye-catching chronicle of the changes, in both landscape and architecture, that occurred in central and eastern Europe throughout the 1980s and early '90s.