The Lost Border: The Landscape of the Iron Curtain [Hardcover]

Brian Rose (Author), Anthony Bailey (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 30, 2004

Every man is a Berliner, forced to look upon a scar. . . .Behind me stands a wall that encircles the free sectors of this city, part of a vast system of barriers that divides the entire continent of Europe. From the Baltic, south, those barriers cut across Germany in a gash of barbed wire, concrete, dog runs, and guard towers. Farther south, there may be no visible, no obvious wall. But there remain armed guards and checkpoints all the same -- still a restriction on the right to travel, still an instrument to impose upon ordinary men and women the will of a totalitarian state.
Ronald Reagan delivered these words as part of his famous "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" speech of June 1987. Two years later, that wall did in fact come down. The Lost Border is the astonishing and powerful visual record of that transformation, published on the fifteenth anniversary of the wall's collapse.
Acclaimed photographer Brian Rose began shooting the borderlands between East and West -- from the Baltic Sea down to the Adriatic -- in the early 1980s, while the Cold War was still hot, and has been taking pictures of this eerie terrain ever since. The Lost Border documents the gradual disintegration of the Berlin Wall and the busy reclamation of what was -- and sometimes still remains -- a scarred and brutalized landscape.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

Lovely, pastoral photos [of] the Iron Curtain, from the Wall in Berlin to fields where people ran for dear life. -- The San Diego Union Tribune, November 28, 2004

Rose makes strange again what had evidently become a fact of life, that the boundary between East and West... -- Art New England, Dec/Jan 2006

Starkly beautiful. -- The Chicago Tribune, February 20, 2005

a collection of starkly beautiful images. -- Jessica Reaves, Chicago Tribune

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 144 pages
• Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press; 1 edition (September 30, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1568984936
• ISBN-13: 978-1568984933
• Product Dimensions: 10.1 x 9.9 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #622,986 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars breathtaking and chilling, August 15, 2005

By 

Inge Rosemann (Greensburg, Indiana) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Lost Border: The Landscape of the Iron Curtain (Hardcover)

I grew up behind that border, lived in this grey cold world. The photographs brought back a lot of supressed memories. Looking through the book, I realized that these memories should be kept alive. Awesome and chilling at the same time. I would recommend this book to anyone....the era has passed but it was real. A lot of lives were lost at that border and many untold stories are buried with it. To me that book is a tribute to all who suffered in the name of freedom, I was just one of many.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Revisionst, October 2, 2005

By 

Hans Dieter Wulf (Corsicana, Texas) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Lost Border: The Landscape of the Iron Curtain (Hardcover)

The Lost Border by Brian Rose fulfills an historical need by photographing the Iron Curtain before it was relegated to the dustbin of history. The photos are are in color and fill the need of being historical rather than some modern black and white modern art form which would have defeated the whole purpose of the book. I have walked the Berlin Wall many times in the 60's & 70's to take photos and aggravate the guards and for me to see the rest of the Iron Curtain in this large format book was a pleasure. I compliment Mr Rose on his endeavor. These photos show the stark reality of the evil of communism in clear detail. The Lost Border is an asset to any library; home or otherwise.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great Idea for a Photo Book, September 29, 2005

By 

Robert A. Donner (Arlington, VA, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Lost Border: The Landscape of the Iron Curtain (Hardcover)

I haven't seen anyone else put together a book like this, with shots from all along the Iron Curtain in the Cold War. My only disappointment was that there's not more of it - because the work in here is excellent, and I would have loved for it to not end so soon. Highly recommended for anyone who is interested in what the Soviets did to Eastern Europe until the fall of communism.