Triptychs: Buffalo's Lower West Side Revisited

New York, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., Inc, 1993. Hardcover. VG/VG-, (pages are clean and clear, binding is tight; signed by the photographer on the rear of the title half-page; DJ has light scuffing and shelfwear). Grey clothover board with silver lettering/black DJ richly illustrated in bw with yellow and white lettering. 141 pp. Appx. 150 bw photos. "In the early 1970s, Milton Rogovin set out to document the neighborhood near his house. He made a series of portraits of working-class people in Buffalo's Lower West Side. Then he returned to photograph the same people in the early 1980s and again in the 1990s. The result is this remarkable and moving portrait of time and place in America. Here are fifty of an acclaimed photographer's engaging Triptychs--a visual chronicle of change, aging, endurance, and finally survival. As Robert Coles writes in his foreword, "These photographs constitute a major contribution to the American documentary tradition. They represent the insistence of one careful, gifted, attentive photographer upon seeing through, as it were, his self-assigned job of seeing." Here we see working people who, like most Americans, find partners, have children and grandchildren, sometimes separate, and sometimes die early. Some age considerably in the ten years between photographs, others almost not at all. Some lose children, change partners and houses, and some visibly change lifestyles. What remains constant is the passing of time and its effects upon his subjects, so evident in Rogovin's work. These are among the themes observed and discussed in Stephen Jay Gould's illuminating introduction. Buffalo, New York, might be an American city with a working-class neighborhood, yet the Lower West Side is a very particular place, as we see in Joanne Wypijewski's text. Through it, Rogovin's people become our neighbors. We hear their voices in personal narratives. The people of Rogovin's Triptychs may not have great claims to fame but through this unusual book they become etched in our memories." -- Publisher's description.