How the Other Half Looks: The Lower East Side and the Afterlife of Images by Sara Blair (review)

In How the Other Half Looks—a play on Jacob Riis's illustrated sociological reportage How the Other Half Lives (1890)—Sara Blair interrogates images of the Lower East Side not only in the documentation of urban squalor but in the project of imagining America itself. She follows the evolution of this space from its nineteenth-century photographic records, its site-specific location shoots in early cinema, its function as a setting for literary realism, its abandonment by American Jews on their way to acculturated suburban bliss in the interwar period, its role in postwar reclaimed memory and the fantasy of return, and its ability to project a terrifying global future. In short, this book "offers a site-specific account of visual experience, practice, and experimentation," which may initially seem like a tall order but is one on which the author delivers (1).

Blair narrates the competing representations of the Lower East Side as a site of poverty and vice and as the birthplace of some of America's (especially New York's) foundational myths. Poet Allen Ginsberg can eulogize his mother's tragic life and death by returning to the womb that birthed his creativity, literally and figuratively, in the tenements of the Lower East Side. But in and of the same area, black poet LeRoi Jones (soon to become known as Amiri Baraka) writes of the Jewish fall into irredeemable bourgeois values with "hip/nose" begotten "under the surgeon's knife" (180).

Such dueling stories, which play out through two centuries of photographing, writing about, writing in, and filming the Lower East Side, provide Blair with a canvas to explore the physical space, the lived experience, and the memories and myths of American phobias as well as the American Dream. These narratives are not merely told but are shown (and brilliantly analyzed by Blair) in photographs. From the earliest days of the Lower East Side, precisely because photographic technologies were becoming the primary tools of perceiving—even exposing such seedy underbellies of the nation as immigration and urbanization—they made history.

The book is not so much a study of photo-technology as it is about how photo-technology was harnessed to new subject matter, not because of any existential reason for this pairing but because of the symbolic relation between new technology and new meanings. As such, Blair treats both to a social history approach. The social history approach to photographic technology affords Blair the opportunity to consider the "halftone revolution" from the perspectives of genteel culture-makers, social activists, and political reformers. Likewise, the social history approach sheds light on how artists and writers mobilized very different spatial and temporal dynamics in relationship to the same site to achieve what audiences have read as both the "universal" and the "particular."

This lens allows Blair to return some agency to the seemingly "arrested" urban subjects of the Lower East Side in the creation of the national image. For example, Blair juxtaposes Jacob Riis's magic lantern lectures of immigrant stagnation against Abraham Cahan's ghetto dwellers in the throes of the sort of frenetic and constant movement that defines the modern moment. In her telling, Cahan recalibrated the realist conventions of his times—particularly the notion of arrest and predeterminism that so suited the photographic medium—with a virtuoso topographic performance of the Jewish immigrant consciousness. This dialectic is reiterated throughout the book to ever more delightful juxtapositions of the ghetto Jew as apprehended subject and mediator of the very image of American modernism. In another chapter, Blair locates the locus of early American film industry in Lower Manhattan, where filmmaker D.W. Griffith filmed Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912) "on location" in the Lower East Side. Based on the real-life murder of Jewish gambler Herman Rosenthal by a Lower East Side gang and a crooked New York City cop, Blair gives the...