Verlyn's Latest Op-Ed is a GEM!!

I can't wait to find the books written by Milton Rogovin...


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/06/opinion/06sun4.html?scp=1&sq=verlyn%20klinkenborg&st=Search

February 5, 2011

Milton Rogovin

By VERLYN KLINKENBORG

In 1994, I was asked to interview the photographer Milton Rogovin because I’d written a book about the old Polish East Side of Buffalo. Rogovin, who recently died at 101, had spent years photographing Buffalo’s downtrodden Lower West Side. In a way, it was like a visitor to Portland, Ore., talking to a resident of Portland, Me., because they both knew something about Portland.

Rogovin’s photography was all portraiture, mainly of working people and poor street folk. You learn a lot about him by the way his subjects look at the lens. He found an openness in their faces, a directness, that says a great deal about his candor and empathy.

“I like to photograph people with problems,” he told me, and he had an important one in his own life. Rogovin was an optometrist, and committed leftist, who only took up photography in his 40s. In 1957, when he refused to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, he was vilified in Buffalo, his business nearly destroyed. Suddenly he had time to explore the storefront churches and streets of Buffalo’s Lower West Side.

When I heard that Rogovin had died, I looked again through his two books. “The Forgotten Ones” has a remarkable series called “Working People,” from the late 1970s. He shot black and white portraits of individuals at work and at home — as the job defined them and as they defined themselves. There is something heroic in the difference, in the ability of these people to step away from their labors and become truer versions of themselves.

In “Triptychs,” the subject is time. Rogovin shot three portraits of Lower West Side residents, each taken roughly a decade apart. One by one, his subjects age, their clothes and surroundings alter, but their identities persist. Not everyone he photographed in 1973 was still alive in 1992. It is astonishing how much loss you feel when the third picture in these triptychs is missing. The pathos of that absence says everything about how Rogovin saw the world around him and how clearly he revealed it to us.