October 31, 2008
Not a Friday Poem
Alec Soth
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."
Published on the Magnum Blog on October 31, 2008
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