Parting Glance:Milton Rogovin, 101

Fred R. Conrad, The New York Times

By David W. Dunlap Jan. 18, 2011 for the New York Times

Milton Rogovin, an empathetic social documentarian who — like Jacob Riis — put a face on the faceless poor, died Tuesday, a month after celebrating his 101st birthday. Benjamin Genocchio has written the obituary for The New York Times. Mr. Rogovin himself narrated an audio slide show of his pictures, “ The Compassionate Eye,” which appeared in April 2009 on Lens, accompanying “Voices Silenced, Faces Preserved,” with text by Randy Kennedy and pictures by Fred R. Conrad, in the Arts & Leisure section.

At a time when middle-class America was fleeing from its decaying inner cities and turning its back fearfully, Mr. Rogovin plunged in, beginning with the Lower West Side of Buffalo. “This ‘fear’ does not figure in Mr. Rogovin’s pictures,” the critic Hilton Kramer wrote in The Times (“Rogovin Photographs of Buffalo Are Shown,” Feb. 21, 1976), when his work was given its first extensive showing in New York, at the International Center of Photography.

He sees something else in the life of this neighborhood — ordinary pleasures and pastimes, relaxation, warmth of feeling and the fundamentals of social connection. He takes his pictures from the inside, so to speak, concentrating on family life, neighborhood business, celebrations, romance, recreation and the particulars of individuals’ existence.

If Mr. Kramer had an objection to Mr. Rogovin’s work, it was that he did not photograph the terrors of life in the disintegrating central city. “This is the limit of his realism — the limit of a sweet, old-fashioned liberalism — but within that limit,” Mr. Kramer wrote, “he has given us something very fine.”

The last time Mr. Rogovin’s name had appeared in the pages of The Times was 19 years earlier (“Inquiry Into Reds at Buffalo Ended,” Oct. 5, 1957), when he was described as the “chief Communist” in the Buffalo area. That was the beginning of his journey into becoming one of the most revered and respected photographers of his generation.

https://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/18/parting-glance-milton-rogovin-101/