Milton Rogovin

From JoAnn Wypijewski at The Nation: Two days after Milton Rogovin died at his home in Buffalo on January 18, the Gage Gallery in Chicago opened an exhibition of his photographs called “The Working-Class Eye of Milton Rogovin.” Class was not merely Milton’s subject, it was the optic through which he saw the world, something that distinguished his work from what the culture had expected of social documentary photography since the 1930s.

His steelworkers and miners, prostitutes and hustlers, the retired and the unemployed, do not want our pity. They look into his camera from among the tools of their trade, on the streets where they work, at home among their treasures or alone against a bare wall. “Who built the seven gates of Thebes?” Milton used to quote Brecht. Who made the world we know? Where did they live? What did they love? And who is left behind? Milton read history and saw some of the people who made it in perspective. Like aristocrats and astronauts, they posed for their portraits, without, as he said, any “monkey business” from him. Read more at The Nation.