COVER STORY
Rogovin is focus of events celebrating his life and career
“Are you, this minute, a member of the Communist Party?” The date was Oct. 3, 1957, and Milton Rogovin, a Buffalo optometrist, World War II veteran and social justice advocate, was being grilled by the House Un-American Activities Committee.
It was the waning days of Mc- Carthyism—so-named for Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s aggressive crusade against communists, real and imagined—and Rogovin, like most political progressives, refused to answer questions on constitutional grounds.
The next day, a headline in The Buffalo Evening News screamed, “Rogovin Named as Top Red in Buffalo, Balks at Nearly All Queries.” The article was one of five on the front page about the suspected presence of communists in Western New York.
The caption under his photograph read, “Milton Rogovin: He gave little information.”
For Rogovin, the celebrated social documentary photographer who turns 100 on Dec. 30, this period of his life was one of his most difficult. (He will be honored starting this weekend with events in the Burchfield Penney Art Center.)
As with many people who refused to give names and considered McCarthy’s hearings an ideological witch-hunt, the repercussions on Rogovin and his family were immediate and profound.
Milton and Anne Rogovin were stopped for questioning several times by FBI agents. A neighbor presented names to the congressional committee in closed session. Another recorded the license plate numbers of cars parked in front of the Rogovins’ house.
And most disturbing to them, their three children—Paula, Ellen and Mark—were ostracized by other families.
The Red Scare notoriety took a toll at work, too. The optometric practice Rogovin owned with his brother, Samuel, lost half its business overnight, and political differences irreparably strained their relationship.
There turned out, however, to be an upside.
Rogovin had graduated from Columbia University during the Great Depression, and the unemployment and suffering he saw left a strong impression. He advocated for such issues as unemployment insurance and voter registration for blacks, and was affiliated with the Buffalo chapter of the Communist Party, which he didn’t publicly acknowledge for years.
He feared after the hearings that such advocacy was problematic.
Rogovin had, however, begun to see photography as a way to make a social contribution and, with reduced work hours, he had the time to teach himself the craft.
As his job providing eye care declined, Rogovin, then 48, turned to the aperture lens for what would become his defining work —illuminating humanity, one photograph at a time.
Buffalo’s own
To put Rogovin’s reaching the century mark in perspective, he was born the same month and year future President Calvin Coolidge won his first political race, and Robert E. Peary was proclaimed discoverer of the North Pole.
Rogovin has lived in the same brown stucco and wood house on Chatham Avenue for the past 61 years. He has been able to do so with the help of regular caregivers —there are currently seven—and, since Anne Rogovin died in 2003, monthly visits by each of their three out-of-state children.
Rogovin isn’t the conversationalist he once was, and his declining sight and reduced mobility no longer allow him to take pictures. But he doesn’t miss a beat reading his own poetry set to his images, or for that matter, off-color Yiddish jokes. (He was born to Ukranian Jewish immigrants who spoke Yiddish in their New York home.)
On a recent day, Rogovin repeatedly broke into Yiddish tunes and songs from “Porgy and Bess.” He also recited a Yiddish verse as he beamed at caregiver Theresa Baker, pregnant with her first child. He translated the words, when asked: “To me you are beautiful, to me you have grace, to me you are the most beautiful in the world.”
Rogovin sat at his kitchen table, above the basement darkroom where he produced his striking gelatin silver prints.
He launched his career with images of storefront churches on the East Side.
That began a half century in which the low-key Rogovin, with Anne at his side, trained his Rolleiflex camera on working-class people, the poor and those involved in the underground economy.
“The rich have their photographer. I photograph the forgotten ones,” Rogovin famously said.
When it’s ‘just right’
For his most recognizeable project, “Triptychs,” the Rogovins visited a six-block area of the Lower West Side three times in 10-year intervals, starting in the early 1970s. The pictures portray mostly Puerto Ricans and African-Americans in the formerly Italian neighborhood.
Jose Esquilin, the subject of one of the triptychs, told The News in 2003 that the Rogovins presented themselves as modest, caring people with unshakeable integrity. “Milton and Anne were the nicest people I ever met,” he recalled. “He is a really soft-spoken man…I felt really humbled around him.”
Monica “Kiki” Cruz, whom Rogovin first photographed when she was 3, agreed. “It made everybody happy when Milton came around. He and Anne made us feel really important. He made my mom feel like a movie star,” Cruz said in 2003.
Rogovin never posed anybody. “The way they’re standing or what they’re wearing, to me it’s just right,” he said. “I don’t know what it means, ‘just right,’ but to me it is.
Rogovin also took no more than three or four frames for each image, in contrast to photographers who take dozens.
Exhibitions of Rogovin’s stunning, dignified work—captured on street corners, in modest homes and inside factories and coal mines from Western New York and Appalachia to Latin America, Europe and Africa—have appeared in major museums around the world including the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Museum of Mod-ern Art in New York and the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris.
A rare dignity
“What I see as his gift is that he attempts to portray people from different walks of life with a human dignity that is rare,” said Ted Pietrzak, director of Burchfield Penney Art Center, which has held four solo Rogovin shows. “It is not dramatized, it is not romanticized. It draws out something very powerful that is common to all of us.”
“His work is vital and important in the evolution of social documentary photography,” said Louis Grachos, artistic director of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, which has held two major shows on Rogovin’s work. “He’s recognized by historians as a national treasure. He’s a very important artist.”
West Side resident Stephen Grazes recently reflected on seven Rogovin images, including a few from “Triptychs,” laminated on a wall in the waiting area at Humboldt-Hospital Station.
“You look at each and every one of them, and they’re all telling you their story about their life. They’re happy about what they’re doing, pleased by what they’re doing. It’s like we’re here, we contribute,” Grazes said.
Last year Rogovin was given a ceremonial key to the city by Mayor Byron W. Brown, who declared a “Milton Rogovin Day.” That would once have seemed unimaginable.
This weekend, the Burchfield Penney will celebrate the man and his work, which may force Rogovin to miss the Saturday silent anti-war vigils held at Elmwood Avenue and Bidwell Parkway.
He was present this past Saturday, clutching a sign that read, “Fund Healthcare, Not Warfare.”
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