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  • Rediscovering Jacob Riis: Exposure Journalism and Photography in Turn-of-the-Century New York
  • Miles Orvell
Rediscovering Jacob Riis: Exposure Journalism and Photography in Turn-of-the-Century New York. By Bonnie Yochelson and Daniel Czitrom. New York: The New Press. 2007.

We have been looking at the Progressive muckraker Jacob Riis for a long time now, regarding him for years in somewhat mythical terms, as the revolutionary founder of documentary photography, a great humanist, a liberal champion of the poor, and a photographer of subtle aesthetic purpose. More recently, he has been seen as a slide-show performer, a popular entertainer with deeply ingrained racial prejudices, whose photographic [End Page 178] "surveillance" of society worked to strengthen barriers of class. This volume by photographic historian Bonnie Yochelson and cultural historian Daniel Czitrom—funded by an NEH Collaborative Research grant—deepens the story of Riis's career and in the process corrects our vision in several important respects. Most importantly, it presents Riis as an accidental photographer with a purely functional relationship to the medium rather than a covert artist with aesthetic purposes.

Czitrom's Riis embodies a linear trajectory, from impoverished Danish immigrant to police reporter on the Lower East Side to friend and associate of powerful reformers and politicians, including Theodore Roosevelt. Czitrom constructs a rich social and historical context for Riis's career, including his many journalistic predecessors and influential reformers like Felix Adler and Lawrence Veiller. Yet Riis is also a "deeply contradictory figure" (xv): if his goal was to improve the lot of the new immigrants, Riis was far from advocating radical social change and in fact was suspicious of organized labor; rather, he sought improvements in living conditions, arguing for stronger laws governing tenement housing and appealing to private philanthropy in the name of Christianity. Riis's belief in the dominant power of the environment to shape people's lives shared the same room with his belief in the fixity of ethnic and racial characteristics. Downplaying Riis's ethnic stereotyping ("a reassuring cultural 'mapping' of exotic others for its genteel audience," [71]), Czitrom stresses Riis as a proto-social scientist, using statistics, charts, graphs, and photographs, along with dialect humor and shocking anecdotes, to get the attention of his audience, both in print and on the lecture circuit.

Part of the problem with coming to terms with Riis as a photographer is our knowledge that he worked with other, professional photographers in his work, hiring them to take pictures he was interested in and sometimes giving them credit, sometimes not. Learning the techniques, he eventually would take a good many photographs himself, but he largely abandoned photography, except for sporadic later uses of the camera, after his major works came out—How the Other Half Lives (1890) and the more optimistic Children of the Poor (1892). Yochelson elucidates, in more detail than we have hitherto known, Riis's photographic colleagues, arguing that throughout his career Riis was focused on the subject itself and its relationship to his narrative, and not on the aesthetic composition of the image. He thought of himself as a collector of images—whatever the source—rather than as a photographic auteur. (Interestingly, he even used the early work of Lewis Hine.)

This is a convincing argument, and Czitrom and Yochelson have expertly clarified a good deal in Riis's career, but they largely neglect the question of how and why these images have worked so powerfully on their audiences, even until today.

Miles Orvell
Temple University
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