Milton Rogovin

• Milton Rogovin, Lower West Side, Buffalo, New York. Buffalo, NY: Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1975. • Milton Rogovin: The Forgotten Ones. Buffalo, NY: Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1985.. • Windows that Open inward: Images of Chile. Buffalo, NY: White Pine, 1985., (paper). Buffalo, NY: White Pine, 1999.. • Portraits in Steel. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993.,. • Triptychs: Buffalo's Lower West Side Revisited. New York: Norton, 1994.. • The Bonds between Us: A Celebration of Family. Buffalo, NY: White Pine, 2001.. • Milton Rogovin: The Forgotten Ones. New York: Quantuck Lane, 2003.,. • With Eyes and Soul: Images of Cuba. Buffalo, NY: White Pine, 2004.. • Milton Rogovin: The Mining Photographs. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2005.. • The Lens and the Pen: Photographs and Poems. Arroyo Seco, NM: Palisade, 2009.. • From the Western Door to the Lower West Side. Buffalo, NY: White Pine, 2010.. • Before and After Coal: Images and Voices from Scotland's Mining Communities, Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 2024..

The incident inspired Rogovin to turn to photography as a means of expression; it was a way to continue to speak to the worth and dignity of people who make their livings under modest or difficult circumstances, often in physically taxing occupations that usually receive little attention. In 1957, a collaboration with William Tallmadge, a professor of music, to document music at storefront churches set Rogovin on his photographic path. Some of the photographs that Rogovin made in the churches were published in 1962 in Aperture magazine, edited by Minor White, with an introduction by W.E.B. Du Bois, a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Rogovin worked on a month-long photographic series on the island of Chiloé, Chile. Poet, Pablo Neruda helped guide Rogovin and provide friends to drive and introduce him to contacts throughout the Island. In 1976 Rogovin began photographing steel workers and electrical workers in the Buffalo/Lackawanna area. Seven years after the initial series, Rogovin returned in 1987 to the homes of the workers and found that not one worker was working where they had been photographed previously. The factories were torn down and the equipment was sold to Mexico or China. Michael Frisch from the State University of New York at Buffalo recorded 2,300 hours of interviews with these workers. From 1981 to 1990, Rogovin photographed coal miners, a project that took him to Zimbabwe, France, Scotland, Spain, Cuba, China, and Mexico. Many of these images were published in his first book, The Forgotten Ones. During his trip to Scotland for The Family of Miners series in 1982 he visited coalfield communities in Ayrshire, Fife and Midlothian. Rogovin traveled throughout the world, taking portraits of workers and their families. 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 2002. In 1999, the Library of Congress collected Rogovin's negatives, contact sheets and 1,300 of his prints. It also holds 20,000 pieces of correspondence. The Center for Creative Photography holds 3,300 master prints—the master collection of Rogovin photography. Rogovin's Rolleiflex camera, his FBI files and other resources are held by the Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo, NY. Rogovin died on January 18, 2011, a few weeks after his 101st birthday.