Picturing the Poor: Jacob Riis's Reform Photography

Jacob Augustus Riis categorized, mapped, and photographed the travesty of New York City slum life in his classic How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (1890). His visual and textual jeremiad against the tenements brought Riis a national fame that endured until his death in 1914. Riis came to the United States three years before the Great Panic of 1873 from Ribe, Denmark. An educated young man who studied English and apprenticed as a carpenter, he could not advance in his homeland. In the United States, he tumbled. Incapable of paying for shelter, he frequented New York's police lodging halls. In desperation he fled the city. He roamed the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest as a tramp, peddled books and flat irons, and worked in shipyards and factories. Within a few years he'd righted himself, became a police journalist, and then a housing reformer, a bestselling author, and a lecturer on the nationwide circuit. Theodore Roosevelt counted him a friend and advisor, "the best American I ever knew" (p. 3). Riis's autobiography, The Making of an American (1901), told how the outsider became insider by dint of dogged persistence and a flair for taking his opportunities where he saw them. Incarnating the Horatio Alger myth, Riis cemented his renown.

Rediscovering Jacob Riis: Exposure Journalism and Photography in Turn-of-the-Century New York is the first book-length study giving equal due to the context of Riis's reform efforts and photographic practice. In two extended essays historian Daniel Czitrom and art historian Bonnie Yochelson independently analyze Riis's twined careers as journalist, reformer, and photographer. Yochelson came to this project during her tenure as former Curator of Prints and Photographs at the Museum of the City of New York (MCNY) where the Riis Collection of negatives and lantern slides represents "the museum's most historically significant collection of photographs" (p. ix). Yet questions persisted about the collection—which photos had Riis himself shot, and how had audiences seen them? Two National Endowment for the Humanities grants allowed Yochelson to "fix" answers to such questions and to engage Czitrom's assistance in historicizing Riis and his photography.

The authors believe Riis's "motives and accomplishments have been often distorted by his advocates and detractors" (p. xiv). For a century Riis has been counted a hero. U.S. history texts reference his reform accomplishments, often printing one of his photographs of the urban poor. In New York his name looms large: a housing project and even a beach are named after him. Scholarly treatments of Riis were laudatory. Students of Riis did note his casual racism; how even as he helped the poor, he could blame them for their plight. Yet Louise Ware's Jacob A. Riis: Police Reporter, Reformer, Useful Citizen (1938) concluded that Riis's "singular power of dramatic appeal" roused "not only New York but other cities the country over." And Sam Bass Warner introduced Riis as a pathbreaker in the Belknap edition of How the Other Half Lives (1970). For Warner, Riis moved reform from the private, charitable sphere to the public, political sphere. Riis made reform visual too: "After Riis the facts became in an important sense, the facts which could be photographed."¹

The photographic world admired Riis no less. As Yochelson tells us, mid-century photographer Alexander Alland resuscitated interest in Riis after discovering a copy of How the Other Half Lives. He found Riis's negatives with descendents, made prints, which the MCNY exhibited in 1947, and convinced "the leading photography magazine of the day" to showcase Riis's photos (p. 125). Alland's 1974 Aperture monograph on Riis had western photographer Ansel Adams marveling at the "intense, living quality" of Riis's subjects. Adams declared, "I am walking in their alleys, standing in their rooms and sheds and workshops, looking in and out of their windows. And they...