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Copyright 2019 by The University Press of Kentucky
Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth,
serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre
College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University,
The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College,
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Morehead State University, Murray State University,
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Untitled, East SideHome, 19611963. The Rogovin Collection, Chicago. Copyright Milton Rogovin. Courtesy, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona Foundation.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Fulton, Christopher B., editor.
Title: The social documentary photography of Milton Rogovin / edited by Christopher Fulton.
Description: Lexington, Kentucky : University Press of Kentucky, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019014994 | ISBN 9780813177489 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780813177496 (pdf) | ISBN 9780813177502 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Working classPortraits. | Documentary photography. | Rogovin, Milton, 1909-2011.
Classification: LCC TR681.W65 S63 2019 | DDC 770.92dc23
This book is printed on acid-free paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
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of University Presses |
Preface
SOMETIME IN 1986, I RECEIVED a phone call from Milton Rogovin at my home in Buffalo, New York. Milton was already recognized far beyond Buffalo as an eminent documentary photographer. But I had come to know him through the American studies program at State University of New York at Buffalo, in which I was a faculty member. Already in his seventies, Rogovin had become a graduate student, earning an American studies masters degree and teaching documentary photography and darkroom technique. My friend and faculty colleague Dick Blau had come to Buffalo from Yale to help launch a radically different American studies program and create the Buffalo Theater Workshop; he went on to be the longtime head of the Film Department at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. But he was then just becoming a photographer and grabbed the opportunity in our program to work under Rogovin. Dick has always said that although everyone could see Milton was a great photographer, few appreciated his consummate skill as a photographic printmaker and how much that skill had to do with his art. From hours together in the darkroom, Dick had come to marvel at how Milton intensified the textures and sharpened the contrasts so essential to the impact of his distinct photographic portrait styleas can be seen in so many of the images in the book you are holding.
Milton was calling me to explore an idea for a collaboration. In the late 1970s, he had produced a well-known series of portraits of workers in Buffalos steel mills and shops, pairing a portrait at work with one taken at the workers home. But every single facility in which he had taken these photographs, he told me, had closed by 1986. Every single worker in those photographs had lost his or her job in steel. And so, he mused, the subjects of his photos were a kind of leading human indicators of a profound transformation in American industry, in our city, and in our society. What had happened to them? What might their stories have to say about these changes?
He had already begun rephotographing earlier photographic subjects, including some of the steelworkers. How about my developing a text about Buffalos steelworkers to accompany his then-and-now portraits? he proposed. You know, like Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, he joked (or maybe it wasnt a joke)he would play Walker Evans, and I could play James Agee.
Well, I certainly thought of Milton as a photographer in the same league as Walker Evans, but I had to tell him I was a very far cry from James Agee and that in any event their book had been a flop upon publication and for many years afterward, due mainly to Agees over-the-top prose. I was, however, getting pretty involved in oral history at that point: How about instead of James Agee, I played Studs Terkel? I could interview the workers in his photographs from the 1970s, asking about the impact of the plant closings on their lives and what they thought about it all. We framed a proposal to link photographs and extensive oral histories and shopped it to what turned out to be some ten publishers. They all rejected it, either because of the daunting costs of the high-quality duotone photographic reproduction Rogovin insisted on or because of my insistence on long life-review interviews without the usual academic commentary standing in between interview subjects and readers. Finally, we found Peter Agree, then an editor at Cornell University Press, who really got it. Portraits in Steel appeared in 1993 as a general trade book in a beautiful large-scale format designed by Cornell.
Some details in this personal story provide framing clues to Rogovins broader work, to the Hite Art Institute exhibition of 2016, titled Milton Rogovin and the Photography of Conscience, and to the sparkling essays responding to the donation of Rogovin photographs to the Photographic Archives of University of Louisvilleall brought together by Christopher Fulton in this powerful book.
Milton was a proud, exacting artisan concerning his photography, determined that it should be presented at the highest professional level in any exhibit or publications. But as he emerged into prominence, he also came to feel limited by the professional photography venues and museum catalogs for which such presentation was natural. He was a radical activist and a labor and political organizer long before he was a photographer and remained so throughout his life; he was a fixture at weekly peace demonstrations in Buffalo pretty much up until his death at 101. He was driven to have his art serve a social purpose and to speak to audiences beyond the orbit of photography as such. His proposal for a book grounded in social issues was part of a broader determination to move beyond the reach of coffee table art books in which he feared he might be imprisoned.
