Rogovin, Milton

ROGOVIN, MILTON (1909–2011). Social documentary photographer, optometrist, and political activist Milton Rogovin dedicated his life’s work to helping people see more clearly. Born in New York City to Russian-Jewish immigrants, he graduated from Columbia University with a degree in optometry in 1931. Radicalized by the widespread deprivations he witnessed during the Great Depression, he dedicated himself to working for social and economic justice. He first worked as an optometrist in Manhattan and then in Buffalo, New York, where he became a charter member of the United Optical Workers Local Industrial Union 951 of the CIO and continued his involvement in the American League Against War and Fascism. After military service during World War II he resumed his optometric practice in Buffalo, serving union members and other workers. He and his wife, educator, author, and activist Anne Rogovin (1918-2003), were politically active, engaging in union organizing and voter registration in Buffalo’s African American community while raising their three children.

Rogovin turned to photography to speak out about social inequities when, following his October 1957 appearance before the House Committee on Unamerican Activities (HUAC), his refusal to answer questions put to him other than his name and occupation earned him the appellation “Buffalo’s Number One Communist” and many of his patients, fearing guilt by association, went elsewhere for optometric care. His first photographic series, made over the course of three years, documented storefront churches in Buffalo’s African American community. He traveled with Anne to make photographs in Appalachia’s mining communities, and to Mexico to meet other socially engaged artists and make photographs of rural laborers. At the invitation of poet Pablo Neruda he traveled to Chile in 1967 to photograph working people on the island of Chiloé.

Beginning in 1970, Rogovin photographed the working and impoverished residents of Buffalo’s Lower West Side, the neighborhood that surrounded his optometry office; he returned to photograph some individuals and members of their families over the course of several decades. In 1978 he sold his optometric practice and took up photography full-time. In the series he titled Working People, he documented the labor and lives of workers in Buffalo’s steel mills and foundries and in their homes; subsequent photographs reveal the impact of the demise of the steel industry in the early 1980s on the material conditions of these workers’ lives. Following his receipt of the W. Eugene Smith Award for Humanistic Photography in 1983, Milton and Anne traveled again to Appalachia, and to Scotland, France, Czechoslovakia, Spain, Germany, Zimbabwe, China, Mexico, and Cuba, to photograph miners at work (where possible) and at home. His Family of Miners series records with precise visual acuity the tools, technology, and built structures of the miners’ labor, as well the material realities of their lives beyond their work.

Rogovin cited as inspiration the documentary photographer Lewis W. Hine (1874-1940), whose photographs also urged structural change and social reform as well as honored the vital importance of human labor in industrial production. In his photographs, the mutual respect shared by the photographer and his subjects is evident as, eye-to-eye, we meet the gaze of these individuals as viewed through the camera’s lens. As they make visible that which might otherwise remain unseen, Rogovin’s photographs of the people he called “the forgotten ones” bear witness to his awareness of how people’s circumstances and surroundings have an impact on their lives and his abiding esteem for the humanity of his subjects.

Herzog, Melanie Anne. Milton Rogovin: The Making of a Social Documentary Photographer, foreword by Douglas R. Nickel, afterword by Catherine Linder Spencer. Tucson: Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, in association with University of Washington Press, 2006.

Isay, Dave, David Miller, and Harvey Wang. Milton Rogovin: The Forgotten Ones. New York: Quantuck Lane Press, 2003.

Keller, Judith. Milton Rogovin: The Mining Photographs. Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2005.

Milton Rogovin: The Forgotten Ones. Exhibition catalogue. Interview by Cheryl A. Brutvan, essays by Robert J. Doherty and Fred Licht. Buffalo, NY: Albright-Knox Art Gallery, and Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1985.

Portraits in Steel. Interviews by Michael Frisch, photographs by Milton Rogovin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993.

Milton Rogovin Website. http://www.miltonrogovin.com