Feature on Martha Camarillo's book Fletcher Street,
published by Aperture

There’s a neighborhood in north Philadelphia that leaves a lasting impression on all who go there, and not because of the crime or the poverty or the crumbling brick residences that make it seem like a war zone located right here in the land of the free. It’s the horses. You can see them on the scarred streets, massive beasts whose pure beauty makes the urban blight around them even more shameful. For generations, this Philly neighborhood has been an unlikely equestrian outpost, a place where riding horses is not just a hobby but also a necessity for the men and boys who gather at the handful of stables there daily to care for the animals and, in the process, for each other.

    At least, this is the case that Martha Camarillo makes in Fletcher Street (powerHouse). In 128 pages and 65 color photos, her book describes a unique pocket of life that few would believe in or comprehend without this visual proof—picture after picture of guys wearing Stussy sweatshirts and oversized basketball jerseys, Timberlands, and knit hats, grooming horses, racing horses or just trotting by the Dunkin’ Donuts. Even the people who live there remain in awe at the sight of their neighbors clip-clopping by. In one photo, girls have stopped their game of double Dutch to gape at a couple of riders. “It’s as if they’ve seen a ghost,” says Camarillo. “The [jump]rope isn’t going anymore.”

    The New York-based, self-taught photographer has been documenting Fletcher Street for three years. She explains that in the 1930s and 40s, the area was home to numerous Jewish-owned stables, and over time it has evolved into what it is today: a rough neighborhood housing perhaps five stables and some 30 horses, all of them African-American-owned. Camarillo learned of Fletcher Street through a music-promoter friend named Peggy, who, as she recalls it, told her “there are kids who ride horses in the hood.” One night, Camarillo and Peggy drove to north Philly, looking for these fabled kids, and by chance, they found some of the adult horsemen out for an evening race. “Peggy and I always joked that she never liked for me to make a full stop at the stop sign,” says Camarillo, noting that carjacking was a very real threat. “She liked to keep the wheels rolling.”

    Camarillo, who is 40, introduced herself to the men and persuaded them to let her photograph them. “They’ve never been into anyone taking their picture or writing about them,” she explains. “They like what they do, and they don’t really need 15 minutes of fame.” She surmises that they trusted her because she was genuinely interested in them. “I wasn’t just trying to make a flash story.”

    Actually, she wasn’t sure what she was going to make of what she saw before her that night or on subsequent visits, of which there have been many. She simply photographed everything that unfolded before her, intrigued by the men and boys (there are no girl equestrians on Fletcher Street), their love for the horses, their sense of community and what she describes as the “street mentoring” that the men provide. Kids of all ages wander in and, by doing chores like cleaning the stable, learn about the horses and eventually earn the privilege of riding. As Camarillo sees it, the stables and the men who oversee them are an important constant for the youths. “We’re talking about an area where everybody ends up going to juvenile detention. People go to jail,” she says. In fact, one of the boys in her book has since died, in a car crash resulting from a police chase.

Part of what appeals to Camarillo about Fletcher Street, she says, is that nobody there is perfect. There’s a strong sense of community, and people look out for each other, but it’s not a movie of the week for the Hallmark Channel. People don’t necessarily learn their lesson at the end. That makes it an interesting subject for a book and, soon, a documentary; Camarillo is now shooting a film on the area that she hopes to complete in a couple of years. But it also means the work may be more challenging than some people can stomach. And the fact that these are photos of black youths, says Camarillo, is another obstacle to acceptance. “I think people are afraid  of this kind of image,” she says. “I’ve just gotten that vibe. People love it, but they don’t want it in their homes.”

Obviously, she wasn’t thinking about how her work would be received when she started the project, and she still isn’t. Her focus is on faithfully documenting the Fletcher Street experience. She notes that she didn’t light or otherwise manipulate the photos in the book. “It’s almost not a photographic process,” says Camarillo, who strove to capture what she saw but not interpret it. In that way, Fletcher Street evokes Remote Photos (Janvier/Léo Scheer), a 2005 book by her and artist Avena Gallagher for which they sent cameras and articles of clothing to various models, with instructions to for the girls to photograph themselves wearing the garments however they saw fit. Gallagher and Camarillo, who once supported herself doing model tests (see sidebar), wanted to reveal how the young women envisioned themselves without a stylist or professional photographer telling them what to do. It, like Fletcher Street, was a project about identity.

Before she fell under the spell of Fletcher Street, Camarillo spent her days shooting editorial for clients like The New York Times Magazine—her first assignment was shooting Pillsbury Bakeoff contestants around the country—and Travel + Leisure. And she still frequently goes on assignment; she recently made portraits of well-heeled art collectors in Dallas for a T+L feature. But Camarillo never stays away from north Philly for long, and she sees herself remaining a part of the community even after she completes her documentary. With gentrification creeping ever closer, she hopes her project will help protect if not the actual stables then at least the traditions of Fletcher Street—maybe result in the stables being moved to a permanent home, where they can be enjoyed by generations to come. And if that works out, her beloved urban cowboys aren’t the only ones who will benefit.

“I sometimes go down to Fletcher Street, and I don’t shoot a damn thing,” she says. “It’s gotten so in my blood, that I just need to touch base with them. One thing they have said is that I’m part of their family now: ‘You’re Fletcher Street. You’re family.’ That’s a big honor.”

(Published in May 2007)

Profile of Sarah Wilmer for PDN's 30 

Sarah Wilmer’s photographs offer a view into a dark and mysterious world where it’s rarely clear exactly what her subjects—usually ghostly-pale young people with a striking sense of fashion—are doing or thinking, but it’s for sure that there’s a lot going on. They are pictures full of tension, a kind of existential apprehension, a love of the clandestine, and these are among the qualities one finds in the work of her influences: the painter Balthus, the illustrator Edward Gorey, the writer Banana Yoshimoto (“Her stories are always about some isolated person,” notes Wilmer), and director David Lynch.

    At a recent book-signing she attended for Lynch’s inspirational tome Catching the Big Fish, he explained that his movie Blue Velvet actually began with an image that came to him of a pair of lips and a car at night. “And I was like, I can totally relate to that!” recalls Wilmer. “Some weird image comes to your mind, and then you make it. He made a whole movie out of those lips. Isn’t it amazing?”

    Though she is just 26, Wilmer has been making so-called weird images for years. As a teen in St. Louis, Missouri, she remembers being “addicted” to taking photos of herself and her friends, some of which were staged on location at places like the airport. She later moved to Portland, Oregon, where she played bass in a band and assisted photographer Mark Hooper. He was an important mentor to Wilmer, teaching her the value of crafting a concept. “For him, people are like props,” she observes.

    They are for her too. The forest at night, levitation, and sometimes both at the same time are frequent Wilmer motifs. “My photographs are dark and weird,” she acknowledges, “but I think people always look really beautiful in them.”

    Wilmer is now based in Brooklyn, attends Parson’s, and works as an assistant to photographers including Chris Buck. She plans to strike out on her own after she graduates in May—a risky move, but she’s not the only one who believes in her ability. “She has developed into a serious and accomplished photographer,” Buck says. “Unlike most young shooters I see, her work doesn't come across as inferior versions of popular contemporary photographers. Her vision is unique and exciting—and you can see her excitement and curiosity in the pictures.”

(Published in March 2007)

Feature on the "Kin" series of books from publisher
These Birds Walk, with photos by Jim Goldberg, Ari
Marcopoulos, Paul Schiek, and Mike Brodie

When photographers publish a book of their work, it’s usually a statement of how different they are from everyone else who ever clicked a shutter. A photo book is tangible validation of the artist as individual: I publish; therefore, I am. Which is what makes the recently launched “The Kin Series” so unexpected. Featuring a book apiece by four photographers, including Ari Marcopoulos and Magnum member Jim Goldberg, “Kin” underscores the ties that bind artists together, and suggests that even those who seem completely independent in their creativity are under the influence of others.
    “Kin”—the brainchild of Oakland, California-based photographer Paul Schiek, who runs the publishing company These Birds Walk—was inspired by an encounter he had with a 21-year-old photographer named Mike Brodie. In Brodie’s gritty but elegiac Polaroids, taken while roaming the country with his camera, Schiek could see the presence of photographic forebears Goldberg and Marcopoulos, both of whom he knew from California College of the Arts, where he studied and where they both teach. When he noted these the similarities to Brodie, the young photographer “freaked out.”
    “He didn’t know who Jim or Ari were,” recalls Schiek. “His work was coming directly from that work, but he didn’t know. And I thought, Man, that’s so interesting. These lessons are kind of handed down through the generations, whether we know it or not.”
    Recalling the punk-rock record series that he used to savor as a kid in Wisconsin—an annual subscription to labels like Sub Pop would get you a new 7-inch every month—the 28-year-old Schiek decided to start a photo-book subscription, with “Kin” as the inaugural series. Every three months for a year, subscribers will receive a new installment: First up, on October 1, was Brodie, the greenest of the four shooters; then comes Schiek, followed by Marcopoulos and Goldberg, respectively.
    Priced at $75, a subscription to “Kin” is within reach for the average art-book buyer—or art collector. Schiek is issuing the quartet of tomes as limited editions (there are 300 unsigned copies and, for a $150 subscription, 50 signed) targeting young collectors who can’t afford prints. “I like the idea that these exist as artwork but on a cheaper level,” says Schiek.
   

    Though the books reference each other, each one is an individual work and has its own name. Brodie christened his “Tones of Dirt and Bone,” a truncated version of the exhibition title from his show at the M+B Gallery in L.A. this past fall. “It seemed so appropriate,” says the peripatetic photographer, whose images came from his encounters riding the railways and communing with those who function on the fringes. “I mean, I was filthy at the moment, like usual—keepin’ clean isn’t real conducive to traveling like I do—and I thought about my photos and how attracted I am to faces of youth, especially when their faces are a little dirty, making their beautiful eyes glow even more: ‘Tones of Dirt and Bone.’”
    Vacillating at the time between cynicism and optimism, Schiek opted to represent both perspectives with his title and leave the choice to the book’s future owner. His doubly dubbed book is called “How Many Humans Does It Take to Change a Lightbulb?, or Stubborn Tiny Lights Versus Clustering Darkness Forever.”
    “Both are appropriations of lyrics that I’ve heard in songs,” explains Schiek, whose first foray outside of Fon du Lac, the factory town where he grew up, was at age 18, when the avid skateboarder booked a one-way flight to San Francisco to check out the skate scene. (His publishing company’s name is an allusion to his growing up “broke” in a working-class neighborhood. “Where I come from, to have a new car is a big deal. It’s like the goal,” he says. “And I found myself with broken-down cars and taking buses and walking a lot. So the name is kind of a jab at that. No matter what, you gotta walk sometimes.”)
    Schiek’s insistently unfussy approach to photography includes using film bought at drugstores and processed by “Mom-and-Pop shops” and working with cameras as ordinary as an $8 underwater point-and-shoot that he uses everywhere but in the water. “I try to make the tools that I use not an issue,” he says. “I like the idea that you can walk into a thrift store, walk out with a 50-cent camera and make something.”
    In this way, he is similar to Marcopoulos, who was a guest speaker at Goldberg’s class at CCA when Schiek was a student there. “When I met Ari, he talked a lot about selling prints to galleries that he made on a photocopier,” says Schiek. “I really loved his reduction of value.” After Marcopoulos’ visit, Schiek began sending him photo books that he’d made himself.
    “I always thought this was a nice thing to do,” recalls Marcopoulos, who even now, with more than five books (including Pass the Mic: Beastie Boys 1991-1996) to his name, has a strong DIY ethos that he indulges by making limited-edition zines. “And I thought that the books were also getting better as they went.” So when Schiek called him to see if he wanted to be part of “Kin,” he said yes.
The title of the book Marcopoulos submitted, “Living in the New Rome,” is an allusion to the rise and fall of the Roman Empire and is his statement about what he sees as the treacherous ambitions of our current Administration, the struggle of the country’s underclass and other socially oriented topics. The last two photos are portraits of what looks like a young girl in an oversized T-shirt, disaffected-looking the first time we see her and smiling radiantly in the book’s last image. Except she’s not a girl but a boy skateboarder Marcopoulos met briefly. “For me, [this teen] is like a future human being where genders ends and race ends, and it’s a beautiful person, very open,” he says.
    The series’ final installment is by Goldberg, who called his book “It Ended Sad But I Love Where It Began,” a wistful title scrawled across a black-and-white image of a James Dean type on a motorcycle, taking a drag off his cigarette as he passes the photographer. Goldberg is highly regarded in his own right, with books including 1995's Raised by Wolves, but he took this opportunity to acknowledge those who inspired him—namely, Robert Frank. “Jim wanted to make it really clear that it wasn’t like we were all coming from him—that he was coming from somewhere else,” Schiek notes.
    Still in the early stages of establishing himself as a commercial and fine-art photographer (his clients include Mass Appeal magazine, and he’s represented by the Stephen Wirtz Gallery in San Francisco), Schiek did his best to keep the series’ production budget modest. Each book costs only about $9 to make because the pages are actually 5 x 7 postcards (he used PsPrint in Oakland). “Once they’re bound into a book, the printing on postcards actually feels like an intentional decision,” he says of the chunky volumes, which are all 20 pages and can accommodate the same maximum number of images (40).
     Schiek designs the books himself in Photoshop and Quark, farming out the typesetting to his designer friend Jason Munn of The Small Stakes, also in Oakland. Schiek then has the cards perfect bound by the independently run 1984 Printing and, with the help of an intern, hand-stamps each one with the title of the series and the four photographers’ names.
    To keep distribution costs down, he’s selling the books exclusively through his website, thesebirdswalk.com, and does the packing and shipping himself, as well as publicizing them to art and culture magazines like Tokion. “Kin” is the first series Schiek has produced but the fourth book project he’s done under the aegis of These Birds, which he founded in 2003. So far, the company has not turned a profit, but he’s started to at least break even. “It’s been a really long learning curve—a financially draining learning curve,” he says.
    Schiek, who promises there will be a new series with different photographers every year, is already mulling ideas for the next subscription. (He’s leaning toward a series on found photos.) And as more people hear about These Birds Walk, he’s been fielding emails from photographers who wonder how they too can publish books of their work. An unprepossessing sort, Schiek doesn’t purport to have any answers, but he does have a philosophy.
    “There’s no reason you can’t do anything,” he says. “If someone gets your package in the mail and laughs at you—like, This dork just sent me this package and thinks it’s a cool idea and thinks I’m gonna write about it—big deal. There’s gonna be a couple of people who are gonna call you back and be like, Wow, this is really interesting. We are gonna write about it.”
    Maybe his next series should be on self-help.

(Published November 2006) 

Feature on Michael Harlan Turkell's photo essay
"Back of the House"

Watch the Food Network often enough—and this writer watches it a lot, usually while eating takeout—and you can become comfortably numbed to the actual work it takes to make a meal. The cheery cook-hosts, the colorful sets, and the premeasured ingredients always add up to the same thing: a perfect, beautiful dish. But executing, say, 400 of those perfect dishes in one night, in a fixed amount of time, for people who are paying dearly for the privilege of eating at your establishment—that’s a different story. That’s Michael Harlan Turkell’s story, and he tells it in “Back of the House,” a photo essay that captures the hustle and flow of some of the top kitchens in Boston.

    A couple of immediate conclusions you draw from looking at the series: It sure does take a lot of carefully coordinated teamwork to make, like, dinner; and the secret ingredient, regardless of the recipe, appears to be adrenaline. In many of the photos, the workers’ hands are a blur of activity, but their faces are a study in intent focus. Spend some more time with the series, and something else comes through: Restaurants—especially high-end ones like these—are theater, and the cast is everyone from the gussied-up maître d’, to the uniformed waiters clapping shut their order books and buzzing off to the kitchen with their customers’ requests, to the food-smeared dishwashers. In one photo, the plump, smooth bodies of what appear to be ducks hang neatly in a row, like a line of costumes that will be called into service later in the program.

    If Turkell—who has kitchen experience of his own, from slinging pizzas to making pastries—had followed his original dream, he himself might have wound up as part of this cast. As a teenager, he dreamed of going to culinary school. Instead, he wound up at community college, where, on a whim, he chose photography as an elective. Finding the subject very much to his taste, he enrolled in the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University in pursuit of a BFA. But his chef side could not be denied, and when it came time to take documentary photography, he decided to shoot behind the scenes at the restaurant where he worked.

    “When there were lulls in the orders, I’d start taking photos around the kitchen—taking pictures of the dishes, so I could remember how to plate them. And then I started taking pictures of the morning prep work, so I’d remember how to do it. So it was kind of like flash cards,” he recalls.

    Then he got to thinking about the anonymity of kitchen workers. Out in the dining room were all of these people enjoying the products of his and his crewmates’ labor, but the two sides would never meet each other. “I always felt kind of underappreciated in the kitchen,” says the 25-year-old. “Well, not even underappreciated, just unknown. There was some kind of accolade that you would not necessarily get from the people that were eating your food, but the people you prepared the food with understood that there’s some kind of honor to it.”

 

    So, fueled by this desire to champion his clogs-wearing brethren, as well as his interest in learning the tricks of haute cuisine, he began taking pictures at other swanky eateries in Beantown. Through friends of friends, he persuaded the folks at Cleo, which specializes in French-Asian fusion, to let him shoot for a couple of days, which eventually turned into three years. “They realized that it was kind of comfortable to have me there, unlike other photographers,” says Turkell. “I knew the function of a kitchen and knew what was about to happen and knew how to capture that—or knew to move away from that so they could do what they were doing.”

    At first, he used a 35mm and no flash, so as not to disturb anyone; he’d shoot with 3200-speed film that he’d sometimes push to 6400. Once he and the staff were comfortable with each other, he started bringing his flash. Now, he photographs with a digital Nikon D70, sometimes with flash and sometimes without, but almost always in black and white.  “Visually, our preconception of food is color—you eat with your eyes. And I wanted to show that all of these highly touted elite, very expensive haute cuisine restaurants, when you strip them on down, they’re all the same,” says Turkell.

 

    He went on to shoot thousands of rolls of film. But even with that quantity of images, he can easily pick a favorite: It features two piles of plates, between which there’s a sliver of a woman’s face. “As clichéd as it may seem—the stack of plates and the see-through—it literally took three years to get. I mean, I always saw that face on her,” says Turkell of No. 9 Park’s Barbara Lynch, who helped introduce him to the city’s foodie community.

    Lynch is actually one of the few women who appear in “Back of the House.” Turkell points out that food is a male-dominated business, but he also says he’s hoping to photograph at Prune and Anissa, two first-rate female-run boîtes in New York City. He moved to the big city earlier this year, looking to further his photography—and check out some cool kitchens. So far, he’s photographed the opening day of BLT Fish, a fancy Flatiron District seafood bistro launched by celebrated chef Laurent Tourondel. He’s also documenting the brewing process for the owners of an alehouse and shooting environmental portraits for a cookbook proposal involving some 50 New York chefs.   

    And Turkell, whose “Back of the House” was exhibited at a café in Brooklyn this past spring, has a project of his own on the back burner: a cookbook based on the series that would feature recipes from the restaurants pictured as well as ones of his own. “I don’t want it to be pretty color pictures of the final dishes,” Turkell enthuses. “I want it to be a little more gritty and hard-working.” We wouldn’t be surprised if people ate it up.

(Published June 2006) 

Preview of the 2005 Larry Clark retrospective at
the International Center of Photography

Larry Clark, the photographer everyone loves to argue about—is he a visionary with a unique perspective on teens or just a pervert?—is having his first retrospective, and it is, to say the least, a charged time for these controversial images to be splashed across a major institution’s walls. When PBS gets attacked for letting a cartoon bunny make friends with a few lesbians, you have to wonder what the response will be to a roomful of explicit photos labeled Teenage Lust.

    And that, of course, is not the only part of “Larry Clark” that provokes. The show consumes virtually every inch of space in New York City’s International Center of Photography. In addition to photographs (including outtakes from his groundbreaking first book, 1971’s Tulsa), the museum has amassed his videos, bookmaking, collages, and films for a comprehensive look at Clark, who pioneered a personal approach to photojournalism, paving the self-reflective way for visual diarists like Nan Goldin. The show is an eyeful—of kids injecting drugs into themselves and others, of gun-brandishing, of teens having sex, about to have sex, whatever. It’s unvarnished and unapologetically candid.

    Clark’s unremitting curiosity in what curator Brian Wallis calls “the teenage experience” may be questionable—especially considering that at age 62, Clark is long past his own pubescent days. But by the time you’ve wound through the chronologically arranged exhibition, all the way downstairs, through the room dedicated to his 1983 book, Teenage Lust, and on to “Punk Picasso” (ranging from old albums to family photos and ephemera, it’s a retrospective of his own making)—you may be less inclined to point your finger at the photographer than at a pop culture infused with mixed messages about sex, gender roles, and violence. This notion might come to you in, say, the room containing Clark’s video work, where there’s a poster of a young Matt Dillon. The actor is in jeans and no shirt, his scrawny chest smooth and his hair long. He’s an echo of Clark’s youthful rebels, packaged for mainstream consumption.  

    “One of the major themes in Clark’s work is really tracing this idea of masculinity,” Wallis explained at the exhibition’s press preview. “How one becomes a man in American culture, with all the various cues and tendencies towards violence, towards misogyny, towards homophobia.” Though even Wallis acknowledged that Clark “sometimes reduces them in a way that appears offensive.”

    It seems it was Clark’s destiny to be a photographer. He was born and raised in Tulsa, where his parents ran a  successful photo business. They’d go around to people’s houses and take photos of babies and kids, and then come back offering the prints for sale. When Clark was 13, he started taking portraits for the business too, and his camera became a constant companion, even when he was just hanging out with his friends. Wallis says he told him that he’d take pictures of his buddies, never imagining he’d do anything with the photos. But, of course, his autobiography—and he is being autobiographical even when he’s shooting other people’s lives—became his art, and an undeniably influential one that even extends to film: Clark has directed five movies, including 1995’s Kids, and at press time was editing his latest feature, Wassup, Rockers? (starring Kids alum Chloe Sevigny and Rosario Dawson).

    Still, as a viewer, it can be hard to be unflinching as Clark is, a dilemma Wallis fully comprehends. Clark’s work “often involves some things that might be shocking or things that you just generally don’t see pictures of,” says the curator. “But that’s an important point to Clark—he was always trying to take pictures that he had never seen before. He was always pushing the envelope of what was allowed in photography.”

(Published May 2005)

Exhibition preview of Milton Rogovin's "The Forgotten Ones,"
at the New-York Historical Society in 2003

It’s 1972, and we’re on the Lower West Side, a downtrodden neighborhood in Buffalo, New York. Three-year-old Monica “Kiki” Cruz’s mom is excitedly dressing her because a man is coming to take their picture, and she wants her daughter to look her best.

    “She didn’t even have time to do her own hair, so she threw on that old floppy hat,” Kiki will recall nearly three decades later as she looks back on the portrait, which shows herself serious and attentive and her mom sitting proudly at her side.

    The portrait was one of several thousand made by Milton Rogovin, a onetime optometrist who over the years has photographed the residents of the Lower West Side, as well as laborers all over the world, in a desire to honor those he calls “the forgotten ones.” Now, the New-York Historical Society in New York City is honoring the 93-year-old photographer himself with “The Forgotten Ones,” an exhibition of some 130 of his Lower West Side images.

    “We like the fact that he’s photographing ordinary people and frequently people of very modest means, who aren’t often depicted in these citadels of culture,” says Travis Stewart, director of public relations for the museum. “And they’re beautiful photos.”

    This beauty derives as much from the subjects—whose faces convey stories of hardship but also of genuine affection for the gentle old man behind the camera—as from the photos’ rich tonalities. Rogovin did the first round of portraits in 1972 and returned three more times over the next 30 years. In Kiki’s case, he traces her evolution from apple-cheeked child to troubled teen to thriving 20-something to in 2001, daughter still mourning the loss of her mother, who died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1998.

    “Even though I knew I wouldn’t get any money out of this thing, I kept working because it was the thing that drove me—the idea of photographing these people,” says Rogovin. “And many of them later on said they were so grateful that I paid attention to them, that nobody paid attention to them.”

    Rogovin and his wife, Anne, who died just this summer, endured hardships themselves. In 1957, he was called to testify in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee (he says he was “active in the radical movement”). The local paper labeled him Buffalo’s “Top Red,” and business at his optometric practice fell by half.

    Refusing to be silenced, Rogovin pursued photography as a way of expressing his beliefs. He never achieved cash-rich success photographing the working poor, but his efforts have brought him notice, from the W. Eugene Smith Award for Humanistic Photography to publication in numerous books.

    In June, the Quantuck Lane Press published a monograph of the Lower West Side images called The Forgotten Ones. It features interviews with the subjects conducted by Dave Isay and Dave Miller of Sound Portraits, a New York–based nonprofit corporation that focuses on society’s neglected, known best for their NPR radio documentaries. (Photographer Henry Wang also collaborated on the book and recently directed an award-winning short film on Rogovin.)

    “His book is a longitudinal study of how people change through time,” notes Isay. “But watching Milton is like a longitudinal study of a documentarian and the impact you can have when you really stick with people and do the right thing—and also how rich your life can be when you don’t sell out.”
 

(Published September 2003)