13 Facts About Milton Rogovin

Milton Rogovin Pronounced "ruh-GO-vin" was an American social documentary photographer.

Milton Rogovin was born December 30,1909, in Brooklyn, New York City, of ethnic Jewish parents who emigrated to America from Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire.

Milton Rogovin attended Stuyvesant High School in New York City and enrolled in Columbia University, from which he graduated in 1931 with a degree in optometry.

Distressed by the rampant and worsening poverty resulting from the Great Depression, Milton Rogovin began attending night classes at the New York Workers School, a radical educational institution sponsored by the Communist Party USA.

Milton Rogovin was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1957.

The incident inspired Milton 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.

Milton Rogovin worked on a month-long photographic series on the island of Chiloe, Chile.

Poet, Pablo Neruda helped guide Milton Rogovin and provide friends to drive and introduce him to contacts throughout the Island.

Seven years after the initial series, Milton Rogovin returned in 1987 to the homes of the workers and found that not one worker was working where they had been photographed previously.

From 1981 to 1990, Milton Rogovin photographed coal miners, a project that took him to Zimbabwe, France, Scotland, Spain, Cuba, China, and Mexico.

Milton Rogovin traveled throughout the world, taking portraits of workers and their families.

Milton Rogovin's 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.

Milton Rogovin died on January 18,2011, a few weeks after his 101st birthday.