Rogovin photographed the miners of Appalachia for twenty years from the 1960s, and, in the 1980s, received the W. Eugene Smith Award to extend his work to Europe, Asia, South Africa, China, Mexico and Cuba. In 1982 he travelled to Scotland. This photograph shows two workers in a complex scene filled with notices and warnings. The two men are shown in their overalls and helmets, one with a torch strapped to it, in what appears to be the lift down the shaft. Due to safety laws in Scotland, Rogovin was not permitted to use flash photography in the mines and his photographs of the miners at work were taken above ground.
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.