We the People...

With these words the signers of the U.S. Constitution declared the sovereign right of free citizens to found a new nation and set out the principles for a new republic. It was a bold assertion of the self-determining authority of the common man, one that is often difficult to reconcile with the nation’s history of exclusion and segregation. Milton Rogovin’s work lays claim to a similar authority. It asserts, through its subjects, the right to visibility.

Rogovin's photographs bring us face to face with the industrial world’s working-class and poor—with our fellow citizens, our neighbors, ourselves. While we may regard the pictures as visual records of a particular segment of society, the people they depict also appear complete, complex, and present. In Rogovin’s work these men and women express their private interests, values, and sense of self. We come to know them on a personal level, and in so doing gain a deeper understanding of who we, the people, truly are.

Milton Rogovin (1910-2011) was born and raised in New York City. Trained as an optometrist, he moved as a young man to Buffalo, New York, where he set up a medical office and began raising a family. He was a modest, sensitive, amiable person with deep compassion for his fellow man and woman. During the Great Depression he became acquainted with leftist political thought and joined the Communist Party. Decades later, in 1957, he was investigated for his communist affiliations by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). The public exposure and resulting financial stress effectively ended his political work.

Photography provided Rogovin with a means to express his social outlook and political convictions. Soon after the HUAC investigation he began taking pictures of poor and working-class subjects in the Buffalo area, paying special attention to African-Americans. Thus began a photographic career that would span five decades. During this stretch of time, Rogovin pointed his camera on various disadvantaged populations: the neglected poor of inner-city Buffalo, the forlorn families and hidden hamlets of Appalachia, steel-workers and other industrial laborers, unwed teenage mothers, Native Americans, immigrant groups, and mining communities round the world. The photographs—particularly those from the series Family of Miners—show commonalities of life in different regions and countries, and document workers’ struggles in the late-industrial, globalizing economy.

The goal of Rogovin’s work was to make visible the invisible, to represent the unrepresented, and to bring awareness to the dispossessed. It was a humanizing project. As Rogovin documented human suffering and injustice, he revealed the individual character of his subjects, showing them not as anonymous victims and drones of the capitalist system, but as dignified, complex, three-dimensional personalities.