Clear vision: Milton Rogovin show "The Forgotten Ones"

Afterimage, March-April, 2004 by Joanna Heatwole

Rochester Contemporary Gallery, November 21-January 11, 2004

Milton Rogovin's show, The Forgotten Ones, recently closed at the Rochester Contemporary Gallery. At age 94. Rogovin continues to make social documentary work which reflects a clear vision and demonstrates active humanist concern. His approach remains unwavering in his singular intent to portray the working poor with dignity, using as little manipulation of the image as he conceives to be possible.

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A quote from American documentary photographer Lewis Hine (1874-1940) opened the show: "I want to show the things that should be changed. I want to show the things that should be admired." Hine and Rogovin both came to photography from other disciplines, using the camera as a tool to advocate for social reform. After finishing an optometry degree from Colombia University, Rogovin moved to Buffalo in 1938. His concerns for workers' rights led him to become active with the local chapter of the Optical Workers' Union and to serve as librarian for the Buffalo branch of the Communist Party. Summoned to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1957, Rogovin remained silent in response to questions about his involvement. Local papers covering the story declared Rogovin, "Buffalo's Top Red," and his optometry practice dwindled to a trickle.

With his business decimated and his political voice silenced by the McCarthy era, Milton Rogovin turned to visual expression to address the inequalities of opportunity in American society. He devoted his time to photographing Buffalo's Lower West Side neighborhoods, documented the working class individuals within a changing social structure. Rogovin's work stands as one of the best examples of collaboration between the subject and the photographer, one based on mutual respect. His is a non-exploitative social history documenting the under-privileged of a post-industrial society that had seen better days.

Like his idol Hine, Rogovin's work focuses on the individual as a way to examine the effects of an unjust society on particular humans. People, consistently centered within the frame and looking directly at the camera, are the essential elements of the photographs. Although Rogovin has made photographs of the lives of working people and immigrants all over the world, The Forgotten Ones contains his best known work from closer to home: the neighborhood near his optometry practice, Along with single small black and white scenes on the streets of Buffalo made with his Rolleiflex camera, several walls of the gallery also display a sequence of multiple images. On closer examination, these photographs are portraits of the same person or family taken in four separate sessions over a thirty-year period. This grouping of portraits over time changes the context of the original images: the initial suspicious gaze of two young people on the stoop of a trash-strewn street seems different when viewed next to the same couple, aging, seated smiling beside their children and grandchildren on their living room sofa. Also present is the reality of those who did not survive long enough to be rephotographed. As Rogovin moves from street photography and images taken in public spaces to more intimate views photographed inside his sitters' homes, the comfort-level changes and a trust projected toward the photographer becomes apparent in these series.

Originally compiled by the New York Historical Society, the exhibit contains multimedia elements such as Harvey Wang's award-winning documentary Milton Rogovin: The Forgotten Ones, and a sound installation featuring the voices of the interviews with participants.

Rogovin's work makes a clear statement: the working people in Buffalo's West Side neighborhoods deserve respect and better access to their country's resources. Although indisputably anchored in a long humanist documentary tradition, this body of modest-sized, black and white silver gelatin prints should not be dismissed as an irrelevant holdover from photography's past. At the recent Strangers: the First ICP Triennial of Photography and Video show at International Center for Photography in New York, new and established photographers demonstrated the latest developments of social documentary photography; digital photography, video, and new media technology were abundant. Despite the differences in technological approach between those works and Rogovin's photographs, many parallels could be observed: images of people in their living rooms, the experience of immigrants, as in Zineb Sedira's featured video work and Rineke Dijkstra's multiple portraits of an immigrant to the Netherlands over some years. Though the subjects may be of activists in the case of Joel Sternfeld, or Madison Avenue shoppers as in Richard Renaldi's street portraits, we are still taken with the beauty and expression contained in the human face. Rogovin's work stands at the frontier of history and contemporary photography, a place where the human subject remains enduringly powerful.