Jacob Riis’s Camera: Bringing Light to Tenement Children by Alexis O’Neill (review)

Progressive Era activist Jacob Riis, best known for his photo-illustrated muckraking How the Other Half Lives and his collaboration with then New York Police Board president Theodore Roosevelt, is the focus of this picture book biography, which hustles through Riis’ early years in Denmark to focus on his journalist career and breakthrough idea to rivet public attention on the plight of the poorest tenement dwellers. No stranger to the hardship of immigrant life, Riis devoted himself to clearing substandard housing and bringing sunlight and parks into overcrowded neighborhoods. When passionate prose failed to win hearts, flash photography that captured residents in their squalid tenements proved convincing: “That’s the solution! Words and photographs together. This was the way to show people the truth.” Though O’Neill’s text casts Riis’ crusade as a success, it’s a fairly shallow overview; it notes but never explicitly examines the photographer’s forced entry into apartments or flash powder fires accidentally set, and the displacement of residents in the cleared communities is only mentioned in closing notes. Kelley’s moody ink and pastel illustrations ably capture the overlapping themes of grim poverty and black and white photography technique. Lengthy end matter comprises historical background, a timeline, sources notes, multi-media bibliographies, and selected reproductions of Riis’ photographs.