Milton Rogovin’s “Approach”: Photography, Class, and the Aesthetics of Making Space

By Joseph Entin, Brooklyn College, City University of New York

(Note: this paper was delivered at the American Studies Association Conference, Albuquerque, New Mexico, October 2008)

In 1977, Susan Sontag published her celebrated book, On Photography, which offered a searing critique of the camera's capacity to objectify and control. "To photograph people is to violate them," Sontag declared, "by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as the camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a sublimated murder" (14-15).

Written with her trademark flair and force, Sontag's book inaugurated a wave of criticism, much of it influenced by Foucaultian theory, that underscored the instrumentality and implicit violence of photography, its ability to police and regulate it subjects, especially those lacking social and political power: the poor, presumed "deviants" or "criminals," and workers. As Sontag herself acknowledged, however, photography is not only a predatory means of taking possession, but also a mode of conferring value; it can potentially be put to counter-hegemonic uses, used to see and frame in ways that affirm and legitimate, rather than strictly contain and control, the presence of culturally disenfranchised persons. At the time On Photography1 was released, one such experiment in progressive photography was being undertaken upstate from Sontag, in Buffalo, New York, by a photographer named Milton Rogovin.

Born into a Jewish family in New York City in 1909, Rogovin attended Columbia and trained as an optometrist, graduating in the midst of the Great Depression. Concerned about the plight of the unemployed, he began taking classes at the Communist Party-sponsored Workers School, and became convinced, as he explained later, that "socialism was the path we should take to create a more equitable society" (qtd Herzog, 28). In 1938 he moved to Buffalo and opened an optometric practice; in 1942, he purchased a camera and began experimenting with photography. Rogovin served in the U.S. army in World War II, and then returned to Buffalo, where he continued to be active on the Left. In 1957 he was called before a House Un-American Activities Committee and labeled by the Buffalo Evening News as the city's "Number One Red." The same year, he was invited by a friend, William Tallmadge, a professor at Buffalo State College, to take pictures in local African American churches where Tallmadge was making sound recordings for a Folkways album of gospel music. Tallmadge finished his work in a few months, but Rogovin continue to work in the churches for three years, eventually completing a series that was published in Aperture magazine, with an introduction by W.E.B. DuBois. It was this store front church series that convinced Rogovin that social documentary photography was the kind of photography he wanted to pursue, and over the next several years, working closely with his wife Anne, he undertook a range of projects to document people he refers to as "the forgotten ones": workers, the poor, indigenous peoples, people of color. He has photographed miners in Appalachia, Asia and Europe, the rural poor in Chile, and residents of Buffalo's Lower West Side. In 1978, he closed
2his optometric office in order to do a photo series in Buffalo area manufacturing plants, entitled "Working People," which was completed between 1976 and 1987. Many of the portraits in his "Working People" series were diptychs: pairings of one photograph taken of an individual on the job, and one at home, and it's these diptychs that I'm going to discuss.

The years during which Rogovin completed this series represented a period of great loss and decline for industrial labor in the U.S., especially in traditional manufacturing cities like Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Buffalo, as the postwar settlement between organized labor and corporate capitalism, which had lifted working-class living standards "to unprecedented heights" (Freeman, JAH 732), was shattered by crucial economic and political transformations, including deindustrialization, the de-regulation of several major industries, and the shift from Fordist modes of production, founded on standardization and labor market stability, to regimes of flexible accumulation (David Harvey), marked by capital mobility, outsourcing, and the movement of manufacturing to the Global South and right-to-work states, which sparked "ruthless downward spirals of wage cutting and deunionization" (Davis, 137). Although, as historian Michael Frisch cautions, the story of Buffalo's economy in the 1970s is not reducible to a pat narrative of industrial demise, the city's core manufacturing base did collapse over the course of the decade, as unemployment rose from just 4 percent in 1968 to over 12 percent in 1975, as several of the city's major steel and automobile plants closed or dramatically reduced their labor forces.1

In the cultural sphere, the political and economic assault on unionized labor was accompanied by a negative turn in the public image of working people. One of the most
3well-circulated pictures of American workers in the 1970s came from the so-called hard-hat riots, when, in 1971, construction laborers violently interrupted an anti-war march in downtown Manhattan, "hitting students with fists, hardhats, and tools and chasing them through the narrow streets of the financial district" (Freeman 237). Over the next two weeks, workers undertook daily lunchtime marches through the canyons of Wall Street, shouting "U.S.A. Alla Way!" "The hardhat demonstrations," historian Joshua Freeman observes, "seemed to confirm a common, middle-class view of manual laborers that held them to be one-dimensional, inarticulate, and intolerant" (Freeman 241).

In the context of the economic and rhetorical attacks on unions and workers that marked the late 1970s and early 1980s, Rogovin's "Working People" series constitutes what Shawn Michelle Smith terms a counter-archive, an alternative array of images that challenges the anti-worker ideology of the emerging neo-liberal regime. If this regime aimed to demean and degrade the public perception of workers—portraying them as resentful, unintelligent, and irrational figures who stood in the way of economic growth and flexibility—Rogovin's images depict them, by contrast, as a diverse group of competent, thoughtful, complex persons. Rather than a monolithic mass of brawny, white proletarians, Rogovin's working people are black and white, men and women, married and single, mothers, fathers, and grandparents. They all work in Buffalo and Lackawanna's industrial plants, but their home pictures indicate a remarkable variety of interests, living contexts, and relationships. In the most basic sense, then, Rogovin's portraits explode the reductive images of working people circulating in much of the period's mass culture.4 But more significant than the image of workers, I think, is what Rogovin's diptychs have to say about the act of looking and the art of photography. In what follows, I want to propose that Rogovin's photography of working people exemplifies a form of democratic social relations founded on collaboration and dialogue.

~ more... ~