Ludlow Street Cellar (1895)
Lodgers in a Crowded Bayard Street Tenement - 'Five Cents Spot' (1889)
The Baby's Playground (1895)
Poverty Gappers Playing (1892)
The Trench in Potter's Field (1891)
Street Arabs in Sleeping Quarters (1889)
Dockrats in Quarters (1887)
A 'Downtown Morgue' (1887)
Bandit's Roost (1887)
The Tramp (1887)
Jacob Riis – The Original Muckraker
Jacob Riis, born in 1849, was third of fifteen children to Ribe, Denmark’s schoolteacher and newspaper editor, Niels Riis. From an early age, it seems that Riis was concerned with the well being of others less fortunate. It is reported that at age 12, Riis donated all of his Christmas money to a poorer family in town. At age 16, Riis was sent to Copenhagen to find work as a carpenter, and at age 21, immigrated to New York City in search of the same work.
Upon his arrival in New York, Riis found the city overpopulated with migrant workers just like him, and was forced to live in government operated poor houses. Eventually Riis found work. However, his work was not as a carpenter, but as a police reporter, first for the New York Evening Sun in 1874 and later for the New York Tribune in 1877. The job of a police reporter required Riis to work in crime ridden, overpopulated, slums. This is when Riis began photographing. He was one of the first to use flash powder in order to photograph the conditions at night. In 1888, the New York Sun published “Flashes from the Slums: Pictures Taken in Dark Places by the Lightning Process.” Riis’s most famous work, a photographic essay on the conditions of the city entitled “How the other Half Lives” was published a year later in Scribner’s Magazine. This essay is considered to be influential in then Commissioner of Police, Theodore Roosevelt’s, decision to close New York’s poor houses. Roosevelt himself apparently coined the term most frequently associated with Riis, “muckraking journalist.”
I became interested in Riis initially because I found his photographs to be moving and purposeful. The details are vivid and the subject matter transported me to another time. I have always been fascinated with city life in this time period and Riis’s photographs are able to bring me there. However, after researching Riis further I became fascinated with him as a person. It is amazing to me that he was able to make such a tangible difference with photographs.
In today’s world, where the conditions Riis photographed have become history, I wonder what kind of statement his photographs makes. I also wonder how this type of “muckraking” photography can function now, and what type of topics it can make statements about.
1 comment:
What I enjoy about Jacob Riis is his utter honesty in documenting the reality of the time period. The simplicity of the images adds a strange complex dimension to the photos that draws the audience into the lives of the subjects without exploiting the subject matter. I would love to know how he gained the trust of the people so entirely that he was able to take the photographs he did, and also view some of his beginning and end works as a means of gaging what his overall development as a photographer was.
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