Milton Rogovin, Working Class Artist and Activist, Presente!
1. Milton Rogovin, Photographer, Dies at 101
New York Times, January 18, 2010
2. The Working-Class Eye of Milton Rogovin
New exhibition - Roosevelt University, Chicago
January 20 - June 30, 2011
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Milton Rogovin, Photographer, Dies at 101
by Benjamin Genocchio
New York Times
January 18, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/19/arts/design/19rogovin.html
Milton Rogovin, an optometrist and persecuted leftist who
took up photography as a way to champion the underprivileged
and went on to become one of America's most dedicated social
documentarians, died on Tuesday at his home in Buffalo. He
was 101.
He died of natural causes, his son, Mark Rogovin, said.
Mr. Rogovin chronicled the lives of the urban poor and
working classes in Buffalo, Appalachia and elsewhere for
more than 50 years. His direct photographic style in stark
black and white evokes the socially minded work that Walker
Evans, Dorothea Lange and Gordon Parks produced for the Farm
Security Administration during the Depression. Today his
entire archive resides in the Library of Congress.
Mr. Rogovin (pronounced ruh-GO-vin) came to wide notice in
1962 after documenting storefront church services on
Buffalo's poor and predominantly African-American East Side.
The images were published in Aperture magazine with an
introduction by W. E. B. Du Bois, who described them as
astonishingly human and appealing.
He went on to photograph Buffalo's impoverished Lower West
Side and American Indians on reservations in the Buffalo
area. He traveled to West Virginia and Kentucky to
photograph miners, returning to Appalachia each summer with
his wife, Anne Rogovin, into the early 1970s. In the '60s he
went to Chile at the invitation of the poet Pablo Neruda to
photograph the landscape and the people. The two
collaborated on a book, Windows That Open Inward: Images of
Chile.
In a 1976 review of a Rogovin show of photographs from
Buffalo at the International Center of Photography in
Manhattan, the critic Hilton Kramer wrote of Mr. Rogovin in
The New York Times: He sees something else in the life of
this neighborhood - ordinary pleasures and pastimes,
relaxation, warmth of feeling and the fundamentals of social
connection. He takes his pictures from the inside, so to
speak, concentrating on family life, neighborhood business,
celebrations, romance, recreation and the particulars of
individuals' existence.
Milton Rogovin was born on Dec. 30, 1909, in Brooklyn, the
third of three sons of Jewish immigrant parents from
Lithuania. His parents, Jacob Rogovin and the former Dora
Shainhouse, operated a dry goods business, first in
Manhattan on Park Avenue near 112th Street and later in the
Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn. After attending Stuyvesant
High School in Manhattan, the young Mr. Rogovin graduated
from Columbia University in 1931 with a degree in optometry;
four months later, after the family had lost the store and
its home to bankruptcy during the Depression, his father
died of a heart attack.
Working as an optometrist in Manhattan, Mr. Rogovin became
increasingly distressed at the plight of the poor and
unemployed - the forgotten ones, he called them - and
increasingly involved in leftist political causes.
I was a product of the Great Depression, and what I saw and
experienced myself made me politically active, he said in a
1994 interview with The New York Times.
He began attending classes sponsored by the Communist Party-
run New York Workers School, began to read the Communist
newspaper The Daily Worker and was introduced to the social-
documentary photographs of Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine.
Mr. Rogovin moved to Buffalo in 1938 and opened his own
optometric office on Chippewa Street the next year,
providing service to union workers. In 1942 he married Anne
Snetsky before volunteering for the Army and serving for
three years in England, where he worked as an optometrist.
Also in 1942, he bought a camera.
Returning to Buffalo after the war (his brother Sam, also an
optometrist, managed the practice in his absence), Mr.
Rogovin joined the local chapter of the Optical Workers
Union and served as librarian for the Buffalo branch of the
Communist Party.
In 1957, with cold war anti-Communism rife in the United
States, he was called before the House Un-American
Activities Committee but refused to testify. Soon afterward,
The Buffalo Evening News labeled him Buffalo's Number One
Red, and he and his family were ostracized. With his
business all but ruined by the publicity, he began to fill
time by taking pictures, focusing on Buffalo's poor and
dispossessed in the neighborhood around his practice while
living on his wife's salary as a teacher and being mentored
by the photographer Minor White.
His wife, a special education teacher, was a collaborator
throughout his career and helped him organize his
photographs until her death, in 2003.
Mr. Rogovin's photographs were typically
