Magnum Blog / Not a Friday Poem

Not a Friday Poem

Cool to see that Simon Norfolk is guest editing this week's edition of the British Journal of Photography. In choosing Milton Rogovin for the cover story, he writes: The fashionistas will run a mile from his photographic style (monochrome is so last century); his tenacity (so 1970s,) humanism (so last year) and his communist politics (so ... oh, didn't capitalism collapse last week?) - but quality will always shine through in the end. While working near Buffalo, I made a pilgrimage to meet Rogovin in 2004 (see the picture here). I was terrified, but he was as sweet and generous as his photographs. I later learned that at age ninety Rogoving began writing poetry (via): "I was sitting in this chair in my living room on my ninetieth birthday, and I started crying as I recalled my father going swimming at Coney Island, and a poem came out. Then I wrote a poem about my mother. I was remembering the time she took me to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City to see a well-known painting called "The Horse Fair" (1852) by Rosa Bonheur. I wrote about 70 poems over the next few years, all of them sitting in that chair. My family joked about it. (Laughing) My son Mark sat in the chair, but no poems came out."

ben

for UK readers, it's probably worth mentioning that Simon Norfolk will give a lecture on November 7th at the annual 'Vision" event that's organised by the BJP. Also speaking will be Simon Roberts, Sam Faulkner and Jacob Aue Sobol. At a tenner, that's a bit of a snip.

http://www.bjp-online.com/public/showPage.html?page=219942

robert

Milton Rogovin is CLASSIC !! Thank you, Alec Soth for bringing to the table a very bright Light !!

Stan B.

Guys like Rogovin, Studs, and Al Lewis- national treasures in the history of humanity.

Alec Soth

Hey Stan, I can't help but compare Rogovin and Studs too and was really grateful to have met them both. You can see the Studs picture here:

http://www.jmcolberg.com/weblog/2008/10/pulitzer_prizewinning_author_t.html

Bob Black

Wow, great choice Simon! :)))))...

Rogovin's series Lower West Side is just brilliant...and total foresaw what would later (albeit for young photographers over the last 10 years in color) become almost de rigeur approach to "street portraiture"...

for the same reason that I love Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep, I absolutely love the Lower West Side series (the revisitation and the Triptychs & Quartets.....

since having fallen in love with the remarkably approached and strangely vibrant (even though it often feels post-apocolyptic) city Buffalo since our friend Jethro Soudant moved there, and we've made a few pilgrimages down, these pictures speak even more to not only the treasure that Buffalo still is, but also what I'd tried to suggest on the long thread about new PJ/Documentary work....

it is the peculiarity of imagery, the peculiarity of one's vision, the peculiarity of our lives that make the most compelling and human "universal" photographic statements....brilliant, strange and absolutely humane work...

thanks so much for sharing :)))...and bravo to Simon too :)))

“The true enemy of man is generalization.”-Milosz

"Everything is made of the same stuff, and everyone is put together differently.” -Berger

cheers
bob

Stan B.

Alec- Never had the honor, though I have had the privilege of seeing Rogovin's original prints and reading a few of Studs' books. And although I wasn't privy to the latter's radio show, I did get to hear Al "Grandpa Munster" Lewis on WBAI in the 90's (god help you if you called and didn't know your history). A self described anarchist who literally sold "snake oil" in the deep South during the 30's (in addition to doing union organizing there), he also taught Black History to the Panthers in Oakland during the '60s, and ran for mayor of NYC on the Green Party ticket in '98.

Once on board a plane, he called Henry Kissinger a mass murderer to his face- and when his assistant got all hot and heavy, exclaimed, "Excuse me son, are you lost? Because if you are, I'm not your father, and I can't help you out!"