| Milton Rogovin | |
|---|---|
| Born | December 30, 1909 New York City, New York, United States |
| Died | January 18, 2011 (aged 101) Buffalo, New York, United States |
| Education | Columbia University, 1931, Optometry |
| Occupation | Documentary photographer |
| Spouse | Anne Snetsky (later changed to Setters), (m. 1942–2003) |
| Website | |
| http://www.miltonrogovin.com/ | |
Milton Rogovin Pronounced "ruh-GO-vin" (1909 - 2011) was a documentary photographer who has been compared to great social documentary photographers of the 19th and 20th centuries, such as Lewis Hine and Jacob Riis. His photographs are in the Library of Congress, the J. Paul Getty Museum,[1] the Center for Creative Photography and other distinguished institutions.
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Milton Rogovin was born December 30, 1909 in Brooklyn, New York City of ethnic Jewish parents who emigrated to America from Lithuania, then part of the Russian empire.[2] He attended Stuyvesant High School in New York City and enrolled in Columbia University, from which he graduated in 1931 with a degree in optometry.[2]
Following graduation Rogovin worked as an optometrist in New York City.[2] Distressed by the rampant and worsening poverty resulting from the Great Depression, Rogovin began attending night classes at the New York Workers School, a radical educational institution sponsored by the Communist Party USA.[2]
In 1938 Rogovin moved to Buffalo and established an optometry practice there.[2]
In 1942, he married Anne Snetsky (later changed to Setters). In the same year, he was inducted into the Army, in which he worked as an optometrist.[3] After his discharge from the Army, Milton and Anne had three children: two daughters (Ellen and Paula) and a son (Mark).
Rogovin was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952. Like many other Americans who embraced Communism as a model for improving the quality of life for the working class and became subjects of the Committee's attentions in the postwar period, he was discredited — without having been convicted of any offense — as someone whose views henceforth had to be discounted as dangerous and irresponsible.
The incident inspired Rogovin to turn to photography as a means of expression; it was a way to continue to speak to the worth and dignity of people who make their livings under modest or difficult circumstances, often in physically taxing occupations that usually receive little attention.
In 1958, a collaboration with a professor of music to document music at storefront churches set Rogovin on his photographic path. Some of the photographs that Rogovin made in the churches were published in 1962 in Aperture magazine, edited by Minor White, with an introduction by W.E.B. Du Bois, a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). That same year Rogovin began to photograph coal miners, a project that took him to France, Scotland, Spain, China, and Mexico. Many of these images were published in his first book, The Forgotten Ones.
Rogovin traveled throughout the world, taking numerous portraits of workers and their families in many countries. His most acclaimed project, though, has been “The Forgotten Ones," sequential portraits taken over three decades of over a hundred families who resided on Buffalo’s impoverished Lower West Side. The project was begun in 1972 and completed in 2003, when Rogovin was 93. In 1999, the Library of Congress collected more than a thousand of Rogovin’s prints.
Rogovin died on January 18, 2011, a few weeks after his 101st birthday.[4]