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Because he believes every life matters, Milton Rogovin will never run out of subjects. The people in his photographs don’t have degrees, pedigrees, or other extraneous records of achievement. In truth, the list of what they don’t own is significantly greater than the list of what they do own. They are factory workers, coal miners, drug dealers, children, guardians, they are unemployed. They are Puerto Rican, Italian, German, African American, Appalachian, and unknown. Rogovin has coined them “the forgotten ones,” and yet their faces are completely memorable, his searing vision masterfully forcing us to witness what is left when everything else is gone. Milton Rogovin pays homage to the unsung souls, those who never rise further than just above the earth’s crust and who, because of it, feel every quake.
Today, Milton Rogovin’s photographs hang in collections as prestigious as The J. Paul Getty Center, the Museum of Modern Art, the Biblioteque Nationale in Paris, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art; unlikely venues for the expressions of a former optometrist. He has tracked every continent to photograph coal miners and their families, steelworkers, Native Americans on reservations, and before the community was suspect, he documented Lackawanna, New York’s Yemeni population. So important is this documentarian’s work that the Library of Congress acquired his life’s work.
Most recently Rogovin was honored at the Burchfield-Penny where many of his famous photographs surrounded him like family and friends. To Rogovin, however, it seems like yesterday that allies were few and far between. It was 1957–46 years ago–that Milton and his wife Anne were called before the House Committee on Un-
American Activities.
“It was because of my compassion for the poor that I was singled out,” he offers, a compassion that cost him a successful optometry practice and isolated the Rogovins and their three young children. And it was his children’s isolation that remains Milton’s greatest suffering.
“Our children weren’t allowed to play with anyone,” Rogovin begins. It was his children’s isolation that remains Milton’s greatest suffering. After a few moments he looks away, not with just his eyes, but with a movement distilled from an ancient slap, an affront that nestled into the heart of its host and never left. When prodded, he cannot father whatever words might establish why his three children grew to leave Buffalo over thirty years ago, to never return. Anne recovers first, attempts to fill in the blanks of her husband’s silence:
“On weekends, we took our kids hiking, to the museums, anything to keep them from feeling like they were ostracized, which of course, they were. Nobody was allowed to walk with them, play with them, nothing, not even at school”.
Not to be silenced, Milton forged ahead with what would become his life’s work, a determination most likely born in the back of his parents’ New York City dry goods store, where his family lived after losing their home during the Great Depression. That same determination found him later enrolled at Columbia University, where he graduated with a degree in Optometry in 1931.
It’s no mystery why, like a divining rod, Rogovin instinctively seeks to honor the struggle that is so familiar to him. With 20-20 precision, he shows us the unflinching humility that is born of struggle. In every photograph you can almost hear him whisper, “go ahead; stare as long as you’re able.” This is particularly true of his triptychs, a series of photographed portraits taken in three subsequent decades, and for me, the most haunting of Rogovin’s images.
The tryptich series began in 1972, when Milton and camera first documented Buffalo, New York’s lower west side. With Anne assisting, Milton photographed countless portraits in natural settings. Couples on stoops, families in living rooms. Single parents, missing parents. Grandmothers with babies, teens with babies. Rebels alone, rebels with sweethearts. Kitchens, basements, storefronts, churches, bars, wherever they wanted is where Rogovin followed the men, women, and children who, for whatever reasons, bared vulnerabilities so close to the surface, they unwittingly provoke your own. The black and white portraits invite the ancient theory that cameras can steal your soul, when in truth it’s Rogovin’s lens reminding us we have one. More than ten years later, Anne would present Rogovin with a new challenge.
“I told Rogovin he should go back,” says Anne with a hint of the chutzpah that convinced her husband to ferret his former subjects. “It was 1984, over ten years later. Imagine what we would find!,” her eyes still twinkling as if the prospect were still unknown.
Rogovin agreed it might be interesting to document the very same people he photographed more than ten years earlier, a feat that would turn Rogovin to sleuth. At the corner of Pennsylvania and West Streets, Milton and Anne spent days flashing hundreds of photographs from his 1972 project, personal flash cards that triggered the memories of whomever was curious enough to stop, to offer assistance. While it was little more than ten years later, the years were seemingly fattened by two. Mothers became grandmothers, boys became fathers, and teens appeared where once were babies.
“There was only once that I was ever scared,” recalls Milton, while Anne closes her eyes in agreement. “When we met this particular fella, he was very suspicious; wanted to know if we had any money. I told him we didn’t have anything on us, but still he agreed to let us inside so I could take his photograph. When we attempted to leave, he blocked us from the door. We showed him our empty pockets and my camera bag, but it was a few moments I thought we might not make it out of there”.
Cancer and heart surgeries would threaten Rogovin, but as with all his struggles, not longer than he and Anne would allow.
“I think it helps that there was so much more I wanted to do,” he offers as reason for his recoveries. “If we just sat in the house watching television, we’d be dead by now.” He is quick to add determination to his longevity. “That, and Anne’s good cooking,” Rogovin smiles. But Rogovin is rarely not smiling during our visit. And rarely does he bypass his wife when discussing his accomplishments, and how his portraits became black and white narratives.
“It was Anne who suggested I return for a third time; she and my kids are the ones who encouraged me,” he says as she smiles in agreement.
Rogovin returned to the West Side in 1992, his sleuthing technique perfected, but his heart ill prepared for the melancholy he would encounter, the tender mercies, the tragedies, the hard-earned map of each survivor’s skin, some people missing, some of them dead. When placed side by side, the fifty triptychs tell fifty stories. The first frames contain portraits that reveal a subtle curiosity, oftentimes an assemblance of hope. The second frames, offer evidence of hardship, though possibility. The third frames speak of acceptance, understanding, and in some cases, loss.
FRAME ONE: A stunningly-muscled young black man stands bare-chested, faces the camera with confidence, mild confrontation. He wears a tall, felt hat, a side-strapped shoulder bag, and around his neck, a bolo. His tight black pants tuck into tall slim leather boots.
FRAME TWO: Twelve years later, the young man appears no older, except for the subtle softening of his bare arms and chest. He wears a tall, straw hat and jeans. His face is accepting, if not affectionate, and he is smiling as his hands gently straddle the shoulders of a preschool boy. To his left, a young woman holds a toddler with two grade school-aged boys beside her.
FRAME THREE: Rogovin has left this space white.
Unforgettable essays told with gelatin and paper, these are lives that defy caption or narrative. And what cannot be determined by process of elimination, is best left unsaid. As with the triptych described below, this is the privacy Rogovin allows.
FRAME ONE/1973: A grandfather stands before a baby stroller, a blanket hung over its canopy to shield a sleeping baby from the sun. The man wears white pants boasting bold square patches on each knee. There is a sweetness to his smile.
FRAME TWO/1985: The grandfather stands with a cane, his smile appears as if strained from disability rather than discontent. His other arm is wrapped comfortably around an unsmiling preteen girl, complacent.
FRAME THREE/1992: The grandfather sits in a wheelchair, his mouth tightly frowned by default, behind him his granddaughter, comfortable with herself, with her place behind her aging caretaker. Her smile is pure, without apology.
Published in 1994, Triptychs remains a stunning twenty-year time lapse that speaks of a lifetime.
After spending an evening with Milton and Anne Rogovin, I tried to follow my train of rushing thoughts, a quote by Graham Greene: “There is a moment in childhood where a door opens and lets the future in...,” an oftentimes blurry moment for Rogovin’s subjects.
Next my thoughts rushed to Stephen Spielberg’s Close Encounters, to the brilliant crescendo of a grounded father driven to delirious distraction by his awakening of aliens, something of which Rogovin knows plenty. I thought about determination and the power that propels. I thought about Anne walking an hour each morning, and then again each afternoon and what moved Milton to conquer cancer, heart failure and oppression; what moved him to start writing volumes of poetry at age 89.
I drove away from their simple brown house with its same brown trim, brown doors, and brown roof, completely taken by its near-extinct brilliance, by walls that refuse to honor their achievements. I drove away in the company of ghosts. Some content, some still fighting, some gone. I drove away and remembered every face Rogovin allowed me to see–the faces of the forgotton ones.
Milton and Anne Rogovin will attend his one-man show “Remembering the Forgotten Ones” at the New York Historical Society on June 24th, 2003.
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