Photo by Milton Rogovin, from the series Lower West Side.
Milton Rogovin, a social documentary photographer known for his stark black-and-white photos of Buffalo’s poor and working class, has died of natural causes. He was 101 years old.
Rogovin is best known for his project “The Forgotten Ones,” a series of portraits taken over three decades depicting the downtrodden families of Buffalo’s poor Lower West Side neighborhood. More than a thousand of these prints are housed in the Library of Congress.
An optometrist by profession and a photographer by passion, Rogovin graduated from optometry school at Columbia University in 1932, but was publicly discredited 20 years later by the House Un-American Activities Committee. His medical practice was severly damaged, allowing him more time for photography.
With only his old Rolleiflex camera, Rogovin would travel to Mexico, Chile, Spain and China, documenting the families of coalminers. “I thought that
Often compared to the work of iconic documentary photographers like Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, Rogovin’s images owe part of their striking intimacy to his trademark method — he never posed his subjects. Instead, he let them get composed and position themselves in whatever way they were most comfortable.
“My photographs are rather straightforward,” Rogovin once wrote. “I don’t try any monkey business — don’t tell them where to sit, what to do. The only thing I do ask them is that they should look at the camera.”
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A beautiful human being who had to heart making a better world for others through his pictures...
A beautiful human being who had to heart making a better world for others through his pictures...