Our Colleagues
Obituaries
Milton Rogovin, UB alumnus, former adjunct professor of American studies, winner of a 1989 UB Distinguished Achievement Award, and an internationally known documentary photographer whose work celebrated the lives of working people and the poor, died Jan. 18 in his North Buffalo home. He was 101.
Just three weeks ago, Rogovin celebrated his birthday with a large and noisy party at his home attended by his family and many fans and friends from the academic, peace and labor communities. Led by guitarists—among them UB librarian Jean Dickson—they serenaded him with many of his favorite songs from the civil rights and labor movements, and shared, as they had before, reminiscences of a life well and richly lived.
Rogovin’s work, often likened to that of Lewis Hine and Jacob Riis, the great social documentary photographers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, also recalls the work produced during the depression for the Farm Security Administration by Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and Gordon Parks.
It always speaks with enormous dignity to the humanity of his subjects. For more than 50 years, he produced photographic series devoted to members of Buffalo’s African American East Side storefront churches; Native Americans on Buffalo-area reservations; the Yemeni community of Lackawanna; the poor of the city’s West Side; the men and women who labored in Buffalo’s declining steel industry; and miners who worked in often-brutal conditions in countries around the world. The photographs were often luminous, always beautiful, their subjects, whatever their material circumstances, striking and proud.
A native of New York City, Rogovin received a BS in optometry in 1931 from Columbia University.
In 1932, he began to take classes in political economy from the New York Worker’s School, run by the Communist Party U.S.A. Around this time he began work as an optometrist, became active in the Optical Union and was introduced to the photographic work of Riis and Hine.
He moved to Niagara Falls in 1938 and then to Buffalo, where he became a member of the United Optical Workers Local Industrial Union 951 of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). He was active in the American League against War and Fascism, through which he raised funds for ambulances and medical supplies for Republican forces fighting fascism in Spain. That year he also met his future wife, Anne Stetsky, with whom he shared a lifetime of devotion to the causes of the peace and economic and social equality.
Rogovin opened an optometric office on Chippewa Street in Buffalo that offered services primarily to the city’s unionized workers. In 1942, he purchased his first camera and volunteered for the U.S. Armed Forces, where he served until the end of World War II.
He began taking photos while in the service—winning his first prize—and returned home to continue his optometric work with his brother, Sam, and to conduct union and political work that included voter registration drives in Buffalo’s African-American community.
With the onset of the Cold War, Milton and Anne Rogovin came under surveillance for their political activities, which included a vocal protest of the arrest of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who ultimately were convicted of and executed for spying for the Soviet Union.
In 1957, having been publicly cited as “Buffalo’s Number One Communist” by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Rogovin’s optometric practice was severely curtailed. His political voice virtually silenced, he began to express that voice in art. He photographed the residents of depressed areas of Buffalo, beginning with a 1957-61 storefront church series that marked the beginning of his commitment to social documentary photography.
In subsequent years, while operating a limited optometric practice, Rogovin produced a unique, remarkable and arresting photographic series of poor and working people on five continents. Along the way, he continued his formal education, receiving an MA in American studies from UB in 1972, where he also taught through 1974.
In 1975, he had his first major exhibition of photographs. His subjects were poor people living in a six-block area of Buffalo. The series, "Milton Rogovin: Lower West Side, Buffalo, New York," was presented at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery.
He continued to visit and photograph his West Side subjects in later decades. The result is a classic series of self-posed pictures taken at eight-to-10-year intervals, with introductory essays by independent journalist and columnist JoAnn Wypijewski and Stephen Jay Gould. The series was published by W.W. Norton in 1993 as “Triptychs: Buffalo’s Lower West Side Revisited,” and constitutes what may be his best-known work. He added to the series from 2000 to 2002, producing photographic “Quartets.”
Rogovin began his “Working People” series in 1976. It featured photos of men and women who worked in the steel mills, foundries and automobile factories of Buffalo, at their job sites and at home with their families. Within a few years, nearly all the steel mills and related industries closed, leaving thousands jobless.
The work was published in 1993 by Cornell University Press as “Portraits in Steel,” with oral histories by Michael Frisch, UB professor of history, and remains a classic of the genre.
Rogovin’s photographic series of Lackawanna’s Yemeni community began in 1977, and from 1981 to 1990, completed the work that became his epic “Family of Miners.” He returned to Appalachia—where he previously had photographed miners in West Virginia and eastern Kentucky—to photograph women coal miners at work and at home, and continued the series with photographs of Scottish, Chinese, Mexican, Spanish, Czech, Roma, Zimbabwean, Cuban and northern French miners and their families.
The series was exhibited in 2004 at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and published the following year by the museum as “Milton Rogovin: the Mining Photographs.”
Rogovin’s work has been widely published and featured in exhibitions in major venues in the United States and Europe. His work is part of the documentary photography collection of the Library of Congress, one of a very few living photographer whose worked was archived as a national resource by the Library, the Getty Museum and other distinguished institutions throughout the world.
Rogovin received many awards during his lifetime, including the 1989 Distinguished Achievement Award from UB’s Arts and Sciences Division, the 1983 W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund Award for Documentary Photography and the 2000 New York State Governor’s Arts Award. He was named one of the 20th century’s “top ten local cultural figures” by the Buffalo News.
Reader Comments