Milton Rogovin föddes i New York 1909. 1931 examinerades han från Columbia University där han studerade optometri. Några år senare flyttade han till Buffalo där han också köpte sin första kamera. 1952 kallades han inför the House of Un-American Activites Committee för sitt politiska engagemang. De trakasserier som följde tvingade Rogovin att stänga sin mottagning och 1958 valde han att genom fotografin dokumentera de sociala orättvisorna i sin omgivning. Serien Lower West Side från 1972-2001, för vilken Rogovin vann erkännande, skildrar arbetarklassens vardag i Buffalos slumområden och är ett värdefullt tidsdokument där den puertoricanska och afroamerikanska befolkningens liv dokumenterats över 30 år.
Photographer Milton Rogovin turns 100 years old this winter, and to commemorate his life’s work as a social documentarian the Henry presents a selection of his arresting black-and-white photographs. Rogovin engages with a variety of people – factory workers, miners, citizens of Cuba and Zimbabwe, and Buffalo’s poor – through the filter of political action, a devotion to social justice, and an abiding sympathy for his fellow human beings.
In his spare time Rogovin, by occupation an optometrist working in Buffalo’s Lower West Side, photographed his neighborhood with the assistance of his wife Anne. In 1978 Rogovin fully dedicated himself to photographing the economic plight of the working class, whom he calls the “forgotten ones,” exercising authorial reticence so that the facts...
Curator: Anna Tellgren
The exhibition Reality Revisited includes more than 300 photographs from the 1970s, all in the Moderna Museet Collection of photography. It gives us a look into several realities, the lives of famous photographers and their views on life and art. The featured photographers represent classic black-and-white photography. They have used the medium in various ways to develop their own expressive style through the photographic image. Postwar street photography and subjective photography were seminal to the photographers whose careers began in the 1960s and peaked in the 1970s before the breakthrough of postmodern photo-based art in the early 1980s. The title, Reality Revisited, refers to the way these photographers frequently used, or returned to, their own reality as a starting point. Many of them s...