Milton Rogovin (December 30, 1909 – January 18, 2011) was a documentary photographer who has been compared to great social documentary photographers of the 19th and 20th centuries, such as Lewis Hine and Jacob Riis. His photographs are in the Library of Congress, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Center for Creative Photography and other distinguished institutions.
In the 1950s, during the McCarthy administration's Red Scare, Rogovin was blacklisted for his left-leaning activities, and was summoned to testify before court. Although he refused to appear, a local newspaper referred to him as the "top red in Buffalo." Rogovin's business was nearly halved as a result, but less business meant more time for photography.
Rogovin turned his camera toward the people in Buffalo's Lower West Side — the poor neighborhoods surrounding his optometry practice. "I never told them how to stand or what to do," he told NPR's Scott Simon in 2003. Rogovin allowed his subjects to compose themselves as proud people, not as victims, in front of the camera. He returned to this neighborhood two more times throughout his career to photograph the same people.
Rogovin traveled throughout the world, taking numerous portraits of workers and their families in many countries. His most acclaimed project, though, has been “The Forgotten Ones," sequential portraits taken over three decades of over a hundred families who resided on Buffalo’s impoverished Lower West Side. The project was begun in 1972 and completed in 2003, when Rogovin was 93. In 1999, the Library of Congress collected more than a thousand of Rogovin’s prints.
(sources: NPR, Wikipedia)
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