Helping Everyone See
by Jeff Weinstein
FEBRUARY 14, 2011 TAGS:
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The practice they advertise is long gone, but two giant eyes on a rickety optometrist’s billboard still watch over a “valley of ashes.” It’s a dismal place …
Where ashes take the form of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally … men, who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.
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That fictional industrial valley is the result of rapacious American greed, or so greed’s impassioned witness F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in The Great Gatsby, from which this passage is taken.
As it happens, oddly similar scenes would later be illustrated, and illuminated, by the work of a real-life optometrist -- who turned photographer. The equally impassioned witness, Milton Rogovin, died Jan. 18, 2011 at his home in Buffalo, N.Y., at the age of 101. Rogovin spent the last half of a long life using his camera to record those very same ashes, in order to brush them away.
What can this century’s photography students think of such an outwardly modest man, now that art-making and creativity are so bound up with career and cash? Slight, cardigan-clad Rogovin (pronounced ruh-GO-vin) sought neither money nor capital-F fame. His dogged black-and-white documentation of those he called “the forgotten ones” – mine workers, steel workers, Native Americans, the town and country poor of all races, especially black – could be dismissed by art-world formalists as politically, but not artistically, important. A worthy record, sure (his negatives and contact sheets are part of the Library of Congress), yet still just record-keeping, evidence of lives that a better economy and brighter future would erase.
Erase lives? No, exactly the opposite. “These are regular people and we must not abandon them in any way,” the driven photographer once said.
Rejecting Rogovin for his political impulse would be a tremendous mistake, and for two reasons. His individual shots, like those of photo-documentarians Jacob Riis, Dorothea Lange, and Roy DeCarava, can be both potent and, paradoxically, exquisitely beautiful. Certain eyes know exactly how to find the diamond in the dust. But also like his predecessors, Rogovin himself stands as a tonic example, his whole enterprise a humanist slap to the faces of those who hide behind art to ignore the world.
Son of Lithuanian Jewish parents who ran a dry-goods store that went bust in the Great Depression, Brooklyn-born Rogovin got a degree and set up optometry shop. Soon the city’s breadlines turned him, like so many angry others, toward socialist ideals. He moved upstate to Buffalo, married Anne Snetsky, his lifelong partner and anchor, and gave eye exams to union workers – Buffalo was then a factory town.
He also joined the Buffalo branch of the Communist Party. In 1957, Rogovin refused to answer when questioned by the House Un-American Activities Committee; was named “Top Red in Buffalo” in a newspaper headline; lost much of his business, but, with new free time, took up photography. (A chronology that lists Rogovin’s mutually invigorating interests can be found on his elaborate family website.)
Tentative first studies were made during early trips to Mexico, and ultimately he took cameras to villages, mines, and factories in Appalachia, Zimbabwe, Spain, Cuba, China. He didn’t travel lightly, Pablo Neruda wrote when Rogovin arrived at the Chilean poet’s home, “but he carried much more than his equipment. Eyes patient and searching. A heart sensitive to light, to rain, to shadows.”
Yet Buffalo’s East and Lower West sides were Rogovin’s lodestones.
Black hands clasp, curl, stretch. Faces are intent on song, study, prayer, undiminished by cracked plaster or makeshift altars. When in 1962, "Store Front Churches" was published in the prestigious magazine Aperture with an introduction by W.E.B. Du Bois, the photo world, at least, took notice.
Its 26 images take us inside the East Side’s raucous places of worship, not as intruders or voyeurs, but as silent, equal guests. Motion is made film-noir expressive by use of the bare-bulb strobe (shown to the 50-year-old newbie by expert Minor White), but the straight-on concern for subject that characterizes all of Rogovin’s work suffuses every single shot. That’s where his artistic power lies.
In 2009, the photographer explained how he treated those he wanted to photograph:
I never directed them or told them where to stand, how to hold their hands, or what to wear. The only thing I asked them was to look at the camera. I liked it when I saw their eyes, and that’s when I knew I was ready to make their picture. When you look at these pictures you know there was no monkey business, and that I was not sneaking around trying to steal pictures of people.
.jpg)
He kept going back and back to Buffalo’s Lower West Side to find, and salute, its ordinary denizens: fathers, sons, shopkeepers; mothers, daughters, bartenders; nurses, loners, lovers. Few are white, most seem poor, all were proudly recorded.
An affectionate obituary in the Buffalo News includes this detail:
Until last month, Mr. Rogovin, the retired optometrist and WWII veteran, even participated regularly in a weekly anti-war vigil held at Bidwell Parkway and Elmwood Avenue, holding a sign that read, "Fund Healthcare, Not Warfare."
Apparently, to artist and activist Milton Rogovin’s credit, he was always himself.
Jeff Weinstein, deputy director of the USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Program, writes about culture and gay issues at artsjournal.com/outthere.
The Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, which retains the archives of Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Garry Winogrand, Harry Callahan, and other great twentieth-century photographers, will archive over 3,500 of Milton Rogovin’s images. Accessible online at http://ccp.uair.arizona.edu/
All images copyright and reprinted with the permission of the Rogovin Collection LLC and the Board of Regents at the University of Arizona.
Milton Rogovin from Daylight Multimedia on Vimeo.
Watch the VIDEO PODCAST
The practice they advertise is long gone, but two giant eyes on a rickety optometrist’s billboard still watch over a “valley of ashes.” It’s a dismal place …
Where ashes take the form of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally … men, who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.
That fictional industrial valley is the result of rapacious American greed, or so greed’s impassioned witness F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in The Great Gatsby, from which this passage is taken.As it happens, oddly similar scenes would later be illustrated, and illuminated, by the work of a real-life optometrist -- who turned photographer. The equally impassioned witness, Milton Rogovin, died Jan. 18, 2011 at his home in Buffalo, N.Y., at the age of 101. Rogovin spent the last half of a long life using his camera to record those very same ashes, in order to brush them away.
What can this century’s photography students think of such an outwardly modest man, now that art-making and creativity are so bound up with career and cash? Slight, cardigan-clad Rogovin (pronounced ruh-GO-vin) sought neither money nor capital-F fame. His dogged black-and-white documentation of those he called “the forgotten ones” – mine workers, steel workers, Native Americans, the town and country poor of all races, especially black – could be dismissed by art-world formalists as politically, but not artistically, important. A worthy record, sure (his negatives and contact sheets are part of the Library of Congress), yet still just record-keeping, evidence of lives that a better economy and brighter future would erase.
Erase lives? No, exactly the opposite. “These are regular people and we must not abandon them in any way,” the driven photographer once said.
Rejecting Rogovin for his political impulse would be a tremendous mistake, and for two reasons. His individual shots, like those of photo-documentarians Jacob Riis, Dorothea Lange, and Roy DeCarava, can be both potent and, paradoxically, exquisitely beautiful. Certain eyes know exactly how to find the diamond in the dust. But also like his predecessors, Rogovin himself stands as a tonic example, his whole enterprise a humanist slap to the faces of those who hide behind art to ignore the world.
Son of Lithuanian Jewish parents who ran a dry-goods store that went bust in the Great Depression, Brooklyn-born Rogovin got a degree and set up optometry shop. Soon the city’s breadlines turned him, like so many angry others, toward socialist ideals. He moved upstate to Buffalo, married Anne Snetsky, his lifelong partner and anchor, and gave eye exams to union workers – Buffalo was then a factory town.
He also joined the Buffalo branch of the Communist Party. In 1957, Rogovin refused to answer when questioned by the House Un-American Activities Committee; was named “Top Red in Buffalo” in a newspaper headline; lost much of his business, but, with new free time, took up photography. (A chronology that lists Rogovin’s mutually invigorating interests can be found on his elaborate family website.)Tentative first studies were made during early trips to Mexico, and ultimately he took cameras to villages, mines, and factories in Appalachia, Zimbabwe, Spain, Cuba, China. He didn’t travel lightly, Pablo Neruda wrote when Rogovin arrived at the Chilean poet’s home, “but he carried much more than his equipment. Eyes patient and searching. A heart sensitive to light, to rain, to shadows.”
Yet Buffalo’s East and Lower West sides were Rogovin’s lodestones.
Black hands clasp, curl, stretch. Faces are intent on song, study, prayer, undiminished by cracked plaster or makeshift altars. When in 1962, "Store Front Churches" was published in the prestigious magazine Aperture with an introduction by W.E.B. Du Bois, the photo world, at least, took notice.
Its 26 images take us inside the East Side’s raucous places of worship, not as intruders or voyeurs, but as silent, equal guests. Motion is made film-noir expressive by use of the bare-bulb strobe (shown to the 50-year-old newbie by expert Minor White), but the straight-on concern for subject that characterizes all of Rogovin’s work suffuses every single shot. That’s where his artistic power lies.
In 2009, the photographer explained how he treated those he wanted to photograph:
I never directed them or told them where to stand, how to hold their hands, or what to wear. The only thing I asked them was to look at the camera. I liked it when I saw their eyes, and that’s when I knew I was ready to make their picture. When you look at these pictures you know there was no monkey business, and that I was not sneaking around trying to steal pictures of people.
He kept going back and back to Buffalo’s Lower West Side to find, and salute, its ordinary denizens: fathers, sons, shopkeepers; mothers, daughters, bartenders; nurses, loners, lovers. Few are white, most seem poor, all were proudly recorded. An affectionate obituary in the Buffalo News includes this detail:
Until last month, Mr. Rogovin, the retired optometrist and WWII veteran, even participated regularly in a weekly anti-war vigil held at Bidwell Parkway and Elmwood Avenue, holding a sign that read, "Fund Healthcare, Not Warfare."
Apparently, to artist and activist Milton Rogovin’s credit, he was always himself.
Jeff Weinstein, deputy director of the USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Program, writes about culture and gay issues at artsjournal.com/outthere.
The Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, which retains the archives of Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Garry Winogrand, Harry Callahan, and other great twentieth-century photographers, will archive over 3,500 of Milton Rogovin’s images. Accessible online at http://ccp.uair.arizona.edu/
All images copyright and reprinted with the permission of the Rogovin Collection LLC and the Board of Regents at the University of Arizona.
Milton Rogovin from Daylight Multimedia on Vimeo.
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