How a police reporter used photography to expose New York’s hidden tenement slums
In short: In 1890, Jacob Riis published a landmark work that forced the public to confront the squalid reality of immigrant life in New York City. By combining raw investigative reporting with pioneering flash photography, he revealed the dangerous conditions of overcrowded lodging houses, forever changing the trajectory of American urban reform.
Jacob Riis, a Danish immigrant and former police reporter for the New York Tribune and New York Evening Sun, spent years documenting the brutal realities of the city's slums. His seminal 1890 book, How the Other Half Lives, originated from a lecture series he began in 1888. By utilizing magnesium flash powder, Riis was able to capture the dark, dingy interiors of tenement rooms and opium dens that had previously remained hidden from the eyes of the upper and middle classes.
The book was a collaborative effort that blended Riis’s journalistic observations and interviews with statistical and sociological data provided by experts like Dr. Roger S. Tracy, the Registrar of Records in the Health Department. Riis’s work was deeply moralistic, influenced by his Christian faith and a desire to serve his fellows. He even secured permission from the poet James Russell Lowell to use a portion of the poem A Parable as an epigraph, which chastised those who displayed wealth while ignoring the suffering of the poor.
The impact of the work was amplified by the inclusion of wood engravings based on his photographs, which illustrated the extreme density of the tenements. Riis documented lodging houses that charged seven cents for a bed or five cents for floor space, and he famously photographed a thirteen-foot-square room housing twelve people. These images provided a visceral counter-narrative to the city's rapid industrial growth, helping to catalyze a movement for urban reform that sought to address the systemic neglect of the immigrant population.
Riis’s career as an activist continued long after the success of his first book. He published nearly a dozen subsequent works, including The Children of the Poor in 1892 and The Battle with the Slum in 1902. His legacy remains tied to his ability to bridge the gap between the two halves of society, using the power of the printed word and the camera to demand accountability for the conditions in which the city's most vulnerable residents were forced to exist.
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Sources
- Summary by Intellect · source: Writer - Jacob Riis: Revealing “How the Other Half Lives” | Exhibitions - Library of Congress
- Also: How the Other Half Lives
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