Good evening, everyone, and it's my great pleasure tonight to introduce Mark Rogovan.
I've gotten to know Mark over the past several months and it's been such a pleasure to be
in his upstairs looking through the photographs of his father.
We did several outings.
This is Mike Endsdorf and Jack Metzger and I, and he is such a great sense of humor constantly
making fun of Mike and myself as we went through this process, which is very important.
And Mark said, keep this short, so I'm going to keep it short.
Mark received his BFA degree from Rhode Island School of Design in 1968 and he was an assistant
thereafter to the Mexican muralist David El Faro Secueroz on his last mural, The March
of Humanity.
From Mexico, he enrolled in graduate school at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
and graduated in 1970 with an MFA degree in painting.
So you can see that the spirit of this blend of the arts and activism is alive and well
in Mark.
In 1972, he founded the Public Art Workshop and in 1981, he co-founded the Peace Museum
and was its director in Chicago for four years.
In 1997, he directed a nationwide organization to celebrate the centennial of the birth of
the actor, singer, and wonderful activist Paul Robeson.
Mark now heads the Rogovan Collection with a mission to promote the educational use of
the social documentary photography of his father.
Among many, many other things, he's still very active in the community.
He's very active with the preservation of the cemetery across the street as he likes
to always mention to whoever comes to his force park home.
So please give a huge round of applause to Mark.
Thank you.
This is my father during the 1950s.
That's his camera, twin lens reflexes called a rolloflex camera.
It has a larger negative than your typical 35 millimeter camera and just wanted to see,
you know, for you to see him at that stage in his life.
You need to know, if you know and enjoy my father's photography, you need to know the
so important involvement of my mother in my father's photography.
My mother was involved in all aspects of my father's photography, except in the dark room.
Like she was integral with everything, development of themes.
She could get somebody's door open, a family's door open 10 times faster than my father.
And once my father selected somebody to photograph, my mother would bring the rest of the family
into the other room so my father could sort of be at peace, you know, in photographing.
My mother traveled with my father on almost every single series, from projects in Cuba
to Mexico, Appalachia, China, Zimbabwe, Scotland, not in Chile.
But I just wanted you to see my mother, she was a real character.
She passed away in 2003.
This was a very important place in our home in Buffalo, a very modest home.
This was our kitchen in Dinette where my father is sitting and my sister, Ellen, is on the
right side, and in the background is a bulletin board.
And that's the way the bulletin board looks now, but when we were kids, it was a pushpin
bulletin board, cork board.
And we as children would comment on newly printed prints from the dark room basement.
So my father would bring stuff up, sometimes dripping wet, put pushpins in each corner,
and we would say, what is that arm doing, jutting into, we don't like that one, or,
you know, and occasionally we'd say that one's a keeper.
So we would, you know, my father would then print more of that image.
Now I'm showing you this because my father wanted to be close to the people he photographed.
He did not walk around as so many photographers today with a long, bare old lens.
So they did not have to get near the people that they were photographing.
And my father was very involved, both at the time of photographing somebody, and in the
case of this, this beautiful white haired woman in the book, surrounding my father
is all her relatives, like 40 years later, including great grandchildren.
And so it's really sweet to see how people have kept up with my father, followed his
work, and our family has kept in touch with many of the people that he has photographed.
Now this is a, I love this image in part because of the rich color.
This was an exhibit of my father's Yemeni photographs in the town of, well, right next
to Buffalo, Lackawanna, excuse me, Lackawanna, which was the big steel town, which now has
massive lots right now, nothing happening.
And my father was walking to one of his projects and sees a woman with a covering and walks
up to her and says, hi, I'm Milton Rogovan, and I'm doing a project on steel workers,
and could I photograph you please?
And she says, oh no, no, my religion doesn't allow that, but you're welcome to come home
and speak to my husband, and he will introduce you to the community.
And so for two years, my father went throughout the Yemeni community from their place of worship
to the schools, et cetera.
And that project was completed in 1979, five years ago, a kid who was in 1979, three years
old, contacted me and said, I'm now living in Dearborn, Michigan, and we just opened
the Arab American National Museum, the biggest Arab population in the United States, wouldn't
it be exciting if your father could have a show of our community?
And lo and behold, a lot of work, that happened.
And the beautiful color, this was the sister of one of the people in the exhibit.
She brought the hanging that's actually on the photograph right behind them.
So decades later, they still had that same piece.
And actually, this woman said, gee, do you think he could come to the house now?
Because the same couch is there.
But just to see my father so beautiful, this was less than a year ago, at age 100, to see
him so full of life.
I don't know if there's anyone in this room who does not know the two people in this photograph,
as Pete Seeger and my father, Milton, and they were together with our family about three
years ago at the Lincoln Center in New York City.
There was a brand new film, an hour-long documentary, called The Rich Have Their Own Photographers.
And that was dedicated at the Lincoln Center.
Pete was the master of ceremonies.
It was just an amazing event.
And that indeed is the best documentary available on my father.
And we might wind up showing that here.
We haven't figured it out yet.
This is my father like a month ago.
My father went in his wheelchair almost every single Saturday to a woman in black vigil.
And it was a silent vigil, but he really didn't care.
He was enjoying himself, enjoying everybody who walked by him.
Could we have the lights, please?
This week we brought my father home from a hospital and brought him to or built a hospice
program at our home.
And I just have to sort of tell this true story.
So here's my father in this hospital bed, and the main person from hospice is ready
to show up.
So we're all waiting for her to show up to enroll my father.
So the doorbell rings.
I go to the door.
And this woman says, hi, I'm Joe McCarthy.
No E.
Oh, well, if you don't get it, ask the message.
It's really true.
On Tuesday, my father passed away surrounded by family and loving caregivers.
It was a real wonderful thing going on with the caregivers, especially with the caregivers.
And that's where he wanted to die.
That's for sure.
Couldn't wait to get home from that hospital.
What he would say or what he would want to say is what he said 40 years ago.
He wanted people to use his photography.
He never titled his pieces as is here because he wanted you to think about the pieces and
not just walk by and say, old man with carriage, he wanted you in your classroom or in your
community center to think about these pieces and try and understand them.
Our family hopes that this show and many other places that are working with my father's
photography will help sort of spread the word forever for 40 years.
My father's work was unknown.
And to so many, it's still very much unknown.
And it's so valuable.
It's so valuable in telling our history.
People should know the website that our family has built.
It's a beautiful website, has over a thousand photographs, has a special section for classroom
teachers with portfolios of my father's work.
We have now, I could rattle off a lot of stuff, but I won't, we have now this one project
that he did and you'll see some of the images here called Portraits and Steel.
It's from the Working People series.
But for you who are educators, we have 16.5 hours of digitized interviews with these workers.
I mean, what more does a classroom need?
And we, two weeks from now, two weeks from now, the Center for Creative Photography at
the University of Arizona, said to say, University of Arizona is going to place all 4,000 images
of my father's work online.
That just was announced today.
The Library of Congress has a beautiful blog and one place that you can see his work and
enjoy it.
I have a quick plug and then a sort of closing comment.
My work for the last eight years since my mother passed away has been really a focus
on expanding usage of my father's work.
So I've worked on film projects and working right now on a new film on my father's storefront
shirt series, which is probably his most important and first series.
So that's been my main work.
I have been recently involved in a very dramatic project that takes place a block away from
where, you know, I didn't do this.
This is my wife, Michelle Mellon-Rigoven, please, front row.
A block from our home is an old German cemetery called Forest Home Cemetery, used to be called
the Waldheim Cemetery, and in the cemetery, the whole entrance is where Roma people, Gypsies,
have purchased plots, graves, it's very unique, very interesting.
And then as you go in, of course, you turn to the left and there is where the Haymarket
martyrs are buried, the May Day martyrs, 1886.
And from that point, till today, literally till today, anarchists, communists, socialists,
and unaffiliated progressives wanted to be buried in the shadow of the martyrs.
And as a matter of fact, there's somebody here now, I think, Beatrice Lumpkin, whose
wonderful husband, Frank Lumpkin, is buried right near the martyrs grave.
And so I'm involved in a project of biographies of all the people who are buried there.
And of all strange days, the dedication for the booklet is May 1st at the monument.
But there's something else more important, and that is that there was terrible vandalism
of the monument at some point 10 to 15 years ago.
And at this very time, there has been fundraising to restore the laurel wreaths that were torn
off the monument.
And that's happening, and it will be a beautiful rededication May 1st, if you have your calendars.
Last comment I want to make is that probably 10 years ago, as my mother was not well, my
parents were talking about harvest time.
They said, this is our harvest time.
Finally their works were being seen.
They were asking for their works, communities, museums, even places like the Getty published
a major book on my father.
And so yes, it's harvest time.
The happening of the show at the same time of my father's death over the next five or
six months, use this show, bring your classrooms here.
All you have to do is call him, call Mike, I have his number, call after midnight.
And email too.
And if it's a community center, if it's a school, if there's a celebration of any sort,
this would be a wonderful place to have it happen.
Thank you all.
