Portraits of a Life's Work
METZ, HOLLY
Portraits of a Life's Work BY HOLLY METZ Somehow we survive and tenderness, frustrated, does not wither. —Dennis Brutus, from Sirens Knuckles Boots Out of the political darkness and enforced...
...His haunting photographs, shot in homes, on porches, and outside the mines, convey a profound sense of exhaustion that permeates setting and subjects...
...You are my witness...
...The Progressive / 25 was from the police, from welfare, or from the FBI, oddly enough...
...The first Lower West Side series took three years to complete...
...The people in the pictures hold still...
...When selections from the Storefront Churches series were published in Aperture in 1962, DuBois provided an introduction...
...And waste its sweetness on the desert air...
...I don't know how to pose," he explains...
...He was forty-eight years old...
...Called before the Committee, he refused to speak, but that did not stop the Buffalo headlines from declaring: Rogovin, Number One Red...
...That's why I want people to look at this darn stuff...
...All of these people have tremendous possibilities...
...They were in desperate shape, as they are now," says Rogovin...
...That same year, Milton and Anne Rogovin traveled to Ap-palachia, after reading about the problems of miners...
...They tell you about their lives...
...Rogovin's perseverance, his fidelity to the mortal face of social problems, became his hallmarks...
...They thought I "In the beginning of the triptychs," says Rogovin, "there are two lines from Thomas Gray: Full many a flower is born to blush unseen...
...His practice almost collapsed...
...The first six months were tough," he says...
...A selection, called Triptychs: Buffalo's Lower West Side Revisited, was published in 1994...
...Milton Rogovin's books include: "The Forgotten Ones," University of Washington Press...
...Bring your camera, the friend said...
...But by the time the Second World War came around, most of the Italians—the affluent ones—had moved away...
...Then, in 1957, the dogged persecution of the McCarthy era caught up with Rogovin...
...In one week," he says, "my income was halved—never to recover...
...Holly Metz is a contributing writer to The Progressive...
...Rogovin added new portraits to the original photographs...
...One of the poorest parts of the city, it had all the problems associated with destitution and societal neglect: drugs, alcoholism, gambling, prostitution...
...Norton & Co...
...Just straight...
...During work on the first series, he had declined to ask for his subjects' addresses or even surnames, which made it difficult to find them again...
...We're going to keep going...
...Members of the embattled miners union and a doctor engaged in black-lung research helped the photographer get to know the miners and their families...
...But he continued working, returning with prints of those who agreed to be photographed...
...I see you sitting there, I ask, 'Can I photograph you?' I let the people do everything themselves—the way they hold their hands, if they hold them around children...
...I figured that's the first time I can speak out—through my photography," Rogovin says...
...This is all important to me," says Rogovin...
...Tell it for me...
...When he first arrived in Buffalo, he remembers, the area was known as an Italian neighborhood...
...I don't try to use tricks...
...Years later, the Miners Series was extended with photographs from Europe, Latin America, Africa, and China...
...Longtime patients were afraid to come to his office...
...I try to show something besides the person, to help you understand that person...
...And when you're wholly inside the picture, the people speak...
...Soon after he began, he saw a picture in a magazine: "Steelworker and child, feeding ducks...
...Windows that Open Inward," and "The House on Isla Negra" (collaborations with Pablo Neruda), soon to be reissued by White Pine Press...
...Look at them closely...
...One day, I'm reading this poem—'Who built the Seven Gates of Thebes...
...And gradually, they started to invite me into their homes...
...It's not like I'm trying to amuse them in any way...
...Portraits in Steel" (with oral histories by Michael Frisch), Cornell University Press...
...l Rogovin quotes from Kurt Tucholsky's Deutschland, Uber Alles: "Once you've studied the pictures for a while, they begin to speak...
...The neighborhood people helped him find those who remained, and he produced a series of triple portraits...
...The Rogovins returned to Appalachia for the next nine summers...
...Rogovin's pictures suggest a collaboration, as if the subjects were saying, "I entrust this to you...
...It's painful to go see these things, when we go there day after day, to see the disintegration of a neighborhood...
...Rogovin's work is unlike that of many contemporary documentary photographers, whose images somehow fill the viewer with shame, a feeling of voyeurism for having followed the photographer's gaze...
...So I got a box of photographs, I went to West Avenue and Virginia, and everybody gathered around to tell me: 'Oh, this one OD'd, she's in jail, he died ...,'" recalls Rogovin...
...Then a musicologist friend, who had been recording gospel singing and sermons in the African-American storefront churches on Buffalo's east side, asked RoFrom 1975 to 1978, Rogovin photographed steelworkers, taking special care to depict women, who were gaining positions in heavy industry...
...He begins with a twin-reflex camera, which requires the photographer to look down, rather than "aiming the camera at anyone...
...And in their place came Native Americans, African Americans, Puerto Ricans, poor whites...
...So many images of poor people are about how easy it is to invade them...
...It's painful, but despite those things, we're going to do it...
...The assembled images form a kind of longitudinal study of individual mortality, the lives of poor families, and the long-suffering Lower West Side...
...I just take the picture...
...A few years later, the city's steel industry collapsed...
...One of the women said to me, 'I'm so glad you gave me a photograph,'" Rogovin says...
...People told their children "not to play with the Rogovin kids, because they were infected...
...Meanwhile, Rogovin had an idea for a new project...
...He adds a bare-bulb flash on a long cord, so he can quickly illuminate interior scenes...
...With his family's assent, he gave up his office and its regular income in 1976 so he could take photographs from nine to five in Buffalo's steel plants...
...And maybe somebody will be moved to do something...
...And he never poses his subjects...
...I want to show them just as they are...
...I don't get down on the floor and shoot up...
...His inspiration for the Working People Series, he says, was the Bertolt Brecht poem, "The Worker Reads History...
...Triptychs: Buffalo's Lower West Side Revisited" (with essays by Robert Coles, Stephen Jay Gould, and Jo Ann Wypijewski), W.W...
...Rogovin's wife, Anne, went to teach in the suburbs, where a loyalty oath was not required...
...Was it kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?'—and I decided, I'm going to photograph the steelworkers," who built America's bridges, railroads, and skyscrapers...
...He photographed for three years, sustaining a depth of commitment unusual in a medium conducive to the "quick take...
...He turned to a neighborhood near his optometry office, a six-block region he called the "Lower West Side...
...My kids think I'm horsing around here!'" govin to work with him...
...It was the beginning of a photographic career devoted to documenting the lives of people he calls "the forgotten ones...
...Rogovin, now eighty-five, has received many awards, including the prestigious W. Eugene Smith Award for documentary photography, but he still struggles to get his work seen...
...I'll have to ask you to write your own caption...
...After moving from New York City to Buffalo, New York, in 1938, he spent long hours at his Optometrie practice, dividing the rest of his time between his young family, organizing the local optical union, and promoting voting rights in the city's African-American community...
...Encouraged by his wife, Rogovin returned to the Lower West Side in 1984, and again in 1992...
...He used the same approach for nearly forty years...
...The musicologist finished his recordings in three months, but Rogovin stayed on...
...American commercial galleries argue that "sad" work doesn't sell, and today's nonprofit galleries often require corporate sponsorship, which is improbable with such content...
...They apparently were determined to smash any progressive movement that was in Buffalo," he says...
...Although he was introduced to residents by a patient who lived there, the photographer was initially received with suspicion...
...He brought a print to each worker he photographed, then asked to photograph her at home...
...While maintaining his diminished Optometrie practice, he spent Sundays chronicling the same five churches...
...DuBois, Rogovin wrote to the author to ask, "Would you look at my photographs and tell me whether it's worthwhile...
...They were published in 1993 under the title, Portraits of Steel...
...Self-taught, Rogovin developed a technique that didn't intimidate his subjects...
...Look in the people's eyes and let them speak...
...Although his photographs are regularly exhibited and sold in Europe, he has not been able to secure an agent in this country...
...After reading The Souk of Black Folk by W.E.B...
...Many of the people photographed standing proudly in their middle-class homes were struggling to hold on to what they had, as heavy industry's well-paying jobs disappeared...
...So they got after me...
...I'm trying to show where they're coming from...
...He suddenly knew the direction his series would take: "I said to myself, 'Why don't I show the steelworker at work and at home?'" By the time he completed his original project, Rogovin had also unintentionally captured the end of an era...
...A selection of these photographs, along with earlier work, appears in a 1985 publication, The Forgotten Ones, quietly reminding viewers that this dangerous and hidden work is done around the world...
...Everybody I photographed, I gave a free print," he says...
...DuBois thought it was...
...By the early 1970s, the photographer says, he was determined to "do some work closer to home...
...Dennis Brutus, from Sirens Knuckles Boots Out of the political darkness and enforced silence of the McCarthy era came Milton Rogovin's calling to photography...
...And it's going to hell...
...The resulting photographs are more than just portraits, for the circumstances around the subjects are as expressive as the people themselves...
...Until he was summoned before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Rogovin, an optometrist and a progressive activist, was only a casual photographer...
...Neighbors would mark down the license-plate numbers of anyone parking in front of the Rogovin home...
...So patiently, that you can study them at your leisure...
Vol. 59 • July 1995 • No. 7
