In three decades, Milton Rogovin and his wife, Anne, captured changes in one upstate neighborhood, while also reaching deep into grand abstractions of nature and time.
Milton’s photographs from the neighborhood originated in 1972, when he was invited to visit the home of a patient, and continued as he and Anne developed relationships with others they met. The elements of personal connection and social history, implicit in Milton’s earlier images, are rendered explicit in his series “Lower West Side Triptychs” and “Lower West Side Quartets.” For those projects, the Rogovins sought out people Milton had photographed in the nineteen-seventies and photographed them again during the course of three decades
Originally an optometrist, Milton was persecuted during the un-American McCarthyite inquisitions of the 1950s. With his practice in rapid decline as a consequence, he turned to photography to express his values, and for sixty years photographed the poor and the working class with a clear eye
This year seemed to have more than its fair share of iconic deaths, but this is not a greatest-hits issue. Instead, we gravitated to those with an untold tale. Ira Glass of “This American Life” edits a special section devoted to ordinary people.
The documentary photographer Milton Rogovin (b. 1909) sometimes returned to the same people over and over for decades. He took these portraits of one family in Buffalo in 1973, 1984, 1992 and 2001. This interview, which has been edited, was conducted by Dave Isay for their 2003 book, “The Forgotten Ones.”
