Jacob Riis: Citizenship and Art

JACOB RIIS: CITIZENSHIP AND ART JamesDougherty The art of the city is an art of juxtaposition and incongruity. The variegated spectacle of its street life is translated into paint or ink. Its polyglotbabble excites or confuses the listener. The city's varying classes and social groups are set in conflict. Its dreams are turned against its actualities. The artist responds to the city's incongruity with an artwork that violates its own rules of decorum: Juvenal, Flaubert, Joyce. Yet for all his extravagance, the urban artist remains within his city's walls. Its variety nurtures his imagination; and, often, he has something to tell it. He is one of its citizens. One connoisseur of the chaotic urban life of the nineteenth century was Charles Dickens, who constantly juxtaposed the political power and wealth of London with the most wretched of its poor. 1 In Bleak House, the street-boy Jo, wolfing down some scraps of food, looks up at the dome of St. Paul's: And there he sits, munching and gnawing, and looking up at the great Cross on the summit of St. Paul's Cathedral, glittering above a red and violet-tinted cloud of smoke. From the boy's face one might suppose that sacred emblem to be, in his eyes, the crowning confusion of the great, confused city;so golden, so high up, so far out of his reach. (ch. 19) This is a tactic of urban irony, used by Jeremiah, Juvenal and Swift,matching a symbol of the city's values against the spectacle of its moral failures and the victims of those failures. One adjustment of the eye, redirecting the reader from foreground to background, juxtaposes the almost invisible beggar boy with the city's most imposing monument to its highest ideal.2 A confusion, the description calls it; a contradiction: if the citizen of London orients himself upon that cross and dome, what is he to make of Jo and his crust of bread? Dickens's genteel readership defused such ironies by reducing characters like Jo to objects of pathos, figures providing a reflector for private feelings like self-pity or fear of failure. At their· best, Dickens's ironies created a civic context within which the reader was bound to feel complicit in the deprivation and outcast lot of his characters. When sentimentalized--sometimes with his assistance--the characters are deprived of that context, and the emotion experienced by the reader is a purely aesthetic one. The contextual background, which might morally envelop the 552 Jam.es Dougherty reader, drops out of sight. The citywhere Jo lives becomes some other place, its fatal workings not the same as those of the city that sustains those who read his story. It is enough to give him a private and delicious pity. In the late 1880s, Jacob Riis was writing about tenement life in New York City, and taking photographs to document what he wrote. His illustrated lectures, his journalism and his books, such as How the Other Half Lives and The Children of the Poor, worked to prevent his readers from reducing the urban poor to objects of pity. To bind reader and tenement dweller in a common context, he exploited directly the kind of ironic visual juxtapositions which Dickens had implied in his descriptions. The photographic camera made such juxtapositions as a matter of course, seemingly without reference to any standard of aesthetic decorum according to which objects were to be recognized or excluded. Oliver Wendell Holmes, like many of those who wrote down their reactions to the first age of photography, was struck with the infinite detail of its image, as well as with its apparent fidelityto the actual experience of seeing. In 1859he wrote: The first effect of looking at a good photograph ... is a surprise such as no painting ever produced.... There is such a frightful amount of detail, that we have the same sense of infinite complexitywhich Nature gives us. A painter shows us masses; the stereoscopic figure spares us nothing,-all must be there, every stick, straw, scratch, as faithfully as the dome of St. Peter's, or the summit of Mont Blanc.... The sun is no respecter...