PHOTOGRAPHS BY MILTON ROGOVIN
May 1 - June 28, 2025
Black Rock Arts is pleased to announce an exhibition of photographs by renowned social documentarian Milton Rogovin. The opening coincides with International Workers Day, a celebration of working people worldwide.
Milton Rogovin (b. Brooklyn, 1909; d. Buffalo, 2011) was an internationally recognized, and locally beloved, photographer who tirelessly championed the city’s dispossessed and disenfranchised, often immigrants and the working poor. Many of our neighbors are already familiar with Rogovin’s work over several decades documenting Buffalo’s steel workers and the residents of the city’s Lower West Side. Such works form the core of this exhibition at Black Rock Arts. Opening the exhibition on International Workers Day offers an opportunity to reflect on the past, present and future of labor in America. Rogovin’s lifelong project is especially poignant at a moment when the value and meaning of human labor is not merely questioned but under existential threat.
Milton Rogovin was born into an immigrant Jewish Lithuanian family in Brooklyn and studied optometry at Columbia University. His family lost their home and business in the Great Depression. “I was a product of the Great Depression, and what I saw and experienced myself made me politically active,” Rogovin stated in a 1994 interview. Rogovin moved to Buffalo in 1938 and opened an optometry practice serving union workers. Following his service in World War II he became increasingly active in the Communist Party, labor unions and the fight for workers’ rights. At the height of the Red Scare, in 1957 Rogovin was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee but refused to testify, leading the Buffalo News to label him “Buffalo’s Number One Red.” His family were ostracised and his optometry practice collapsed.
Moved by the documentary photography of Lewis Hine and Jacob Riis, Rogovin turned to photography as a tool for engaging the social justice causes that were important to him. By the early 1960s his photographs of storefront churches in Buffalo’s East Side, and their mostly poor, Black congregants, garnered widespread recognition. W.E.B. Du Bois wrote of the “astonishingly human” quality of Rogovin’s portraits. Rogovin went on to photograph Indigenous Americans in Western New York; began documenting residents of the city’s Lower West Side; traveled internationally to document the lives of miners and their families; and was invited by poet Pablo Neruda to travel and photograph in Chile. In the 1970s he began what is perhaps best known series, “Working People”, depicting Buffalo’s steel workers at work and in their homes.
Rogovin had his first major exhibition in 1975 at the Albright-Knox Gallery. His work is the subject of several monographs and has been presented in exhibitions worldwide. Major institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum and George Eastman House hold major collections of Rogovin’s photography. His entire archive was acquired by the Library of Congress in 1999. Milton Rogovin remained an active photographer into this century. He died in Buffalo in 2011 at the age of 101.
This exhibition of Milton Rogovin photographs is free and open to the public. Black Rock Arts is located at 43 Hamilton Street, corner of Dearborn, in Buffalo’s historic Black Rock neighborhood. Viewing hours are Thursday, May 1, from 5 to 7 PM; Friday, May 2, from 5 to 8 PM; Saturday, May 3, from 11 AM to 3 PM; and thereafter, every Saturday from 11 AM to 3 PM. Black Rock Arts is also open by appointment.