Rogovin photographed the miners of Appalachia for twenty years from the 1960s. In the 1980s he received the W. Eugene Smith Award to extend his work to Europe, Asia, South Africa, China, Mexico and Cuba. The photographs are presented as pairs, showing the men at work and at home, to give an idea of his subjects in society, beyond their function as workers. The series, known as `The Family of Miners?, bears a deliberate reference to the international sympathies of the exhibition, `The Family of Man?, staged by Edward Steichen at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1955, where photography was grouped around universal themes of human experience.
Milton Rogovin (American, 1909 - 2011)
Born in New York, Rogovin was one of America?s most significant social documentary photographers. However, he initially trained as an optometrist at Columba University and in 1939 moved to Buffalo to establish his own optometric business. Rogovin was profoundly affected by the Great Depression and he subsequently became a political victim of the suspicious, anti-communist McCarthy regime in 1952. As a result, he turned to photography as a means of expressing his views. His photography was consciously humanist and focuses on the dispossessed; he said: ?The rich have their own photographers?I photograph the forgotten ones?. He went on to study American Studies at the University of Buffalo; where he then taught documentary photography until 1974.