[Marxism] Milton Rogovin, a people's photographer

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

(Go to link below for slide show of Rogovin's work.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/arts/design/09kenn.htm
NY Times, August 9, 2009
Voices Silenced, Faces Preserved
By RANDY KENNEDY

BUFFALO

ON the wall above the kitchen table in Milton Rogovin’s modest home here 
hangs a handwritten sign listing some of the notable events of 1909: 
Geronimo’s death in prison; the first full year of production for Ford’s 
Model T; the founding of what was to become the N.A.A.C.P.; the birth in 
New York City of Milton Rogovin, who, approaching 100, is one of the 
country’s most revered social-documentary photographers.

Mr. Rogovin was an optometrist whose business was decimated and his 
children shunned after he refused to testify before the House 
Un-American Activities Committee in 1958. An article published that year 
in The New York Times reported that friendly witnesses described him as 
“the chief Communist in the area.” He turned to photography because his 
“voice was essentially silenced,” as he once said. What followed was 
more than 40 years of powerfully straightforward pictures of others 
without voices: the poor and working class of Buffalo’s East Side and 
Lower West Side, Appalachia, Mexico, Chile and other countries.

Visiting Mr. Rogovin has long been a rite for photographers, curators, 
historians, activists and writers. These days, in tenuous health, he no 
longer actively photographs. His wife of 61 years, Anne, an educator and 
writer who was an active partner in his projects, died in 2003. And his 
basement darkroom is now mostly empty, his negatives, contacts and 
prints having moved to institutions like the J. Paul Getty Museum and 
the Library of Congress. (He has been nominated to receive this year’s 
National Medal of Arts, the kind of establishment recognition a former 
card-carrying Communist never expected.)

Over lunch recently with his daughter, Ellen Rogovin Hart, Mr. Rogovin 
opened his picture notebooks as if they were family albums, to take 
another visitor through an exceptional half-century record of struggle, 
suffering, determination and hope.

“I made a lot of use of that darkroom down there, oh boy,” he said, 
adding with a smile, “Well, enough is enough.”


________________________________________________
YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
Send list submissions to: Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Set your options at: 
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40archives.econ.utah.edu