Born and raised in Denmark, Jacob Riis immigrated to the United
States in 1870. Ten years later, Theodore Roosevelt, then a rising New
York politician, hailed him as "the most useful citizen of New York"
and a model American. The key to his acclaim was Riis' journalism-not
just his photography, which is well known, but his writing.
As a police reporter for the New York Tribune, Riis got
close to all the ailments of the New York City slums. It was this very
interaction, along with Riis' deep-rooted belief that good, ethical
living is possible, that drove Riis to strive for reform. It remains an
irony that Riis' poorly lighted, unfocused, often staged photographs
hold him a place as one of the greatest photojournalists in history.
One could easily say that his writing overwhelmed his photography.
After immigrating to the United States, Riis finally found a job as a police reporter in 1877 for the New York Tribune. Here,
Riis found his lifework. He studied the East Side and discovered the
New York slums in an area at the southern end of Mulberry Street that
he called "The Bend." In 1888, Riis began a series of lectures before
the Society of Amateur Photographers. His two-hour lecture, which was
made up predominantly of slides, "depicted a city in various stages of
disintegration and dissolution. The plight of those disinherited from
the basic needs of life." One reporter commented, "Every place of
misery, vice and crime that was not too horrible to show was presented."
Though he wrote several books, including The Children of the Poor (1892), The Battle With the Slum (1902), and The Peril and Preservation of the Home (1903), Riis' most famous work is How the Other Half Lives (1890), his terrifying vision of the city. Specifically, the book focuses on the conditions in tenement houses in New York.
"Leaving the Elevated Railroad where it dives under the Brooklyn Bridge
at Franklin Square, scarce a dozen steps will take us where we wish to
go." Riis draws us in with vivid description. "We stand upon the domain
of the tenement." In this collection of stories, Riis describes-with
humor-the horrors of New York City slums. "In this metropolis, let it
be understood, there is no public street where the stranger may not go
safely by day and by night, provided he knows how to mind his own
business and is sober."
With fluent style and grace, Riis takes us inside the tenements, with
their filthy surroundings and horrible living conditions. He describes
the plight of certain ethnic groups in New York. The Italian immigrant,
he claims, "reproduces conditions of destitution and disorder which,
set in the frame-work of Mediterranean exuberance, are the delight of
the artist, but in a matter-of-fact American community become its
danger and reproach." Riis herein describes the culture shock, an
explosion of mixed traditions and ways of life, which proliferated in
the streets of New York City.
Riis is famous for his descriptions of The Bend, "where Mulberry Street
crooks like an elbow within hail of the old depravity of the Five
Points ... foul core of New York's slums." In this story, Riis mentions a
stunning census, which returned only 24 of the 609 tenements to livable
condition.
Riis' description of a police raid on a beer dive is humorously
cynical: "A raid was on foot, but whether on the Chinese fan-tan games,
on the opium joints of Mott and Pell Streets, or on dens of even worse
character, was a matter of guess-work in the men's room. When the last
patrol man had come in from his beat all doubt was dispelled by the
brief order ‘To the Bend.'" He describes the trip to the Bend like a
horror movie, slowly the landscape going haywire, dissipating as he and
the beat cops moved through the decay of Mulberry Street. Finally
reaching the beer dive, they discover the pathetic inhabitants, filthy
and ragged. He describes the walls and ceiling "that might have once
been clean-assuredly the floor had not in the memory of man." He
describes how there were several more cellars to be raided and finally
the procession back to the station.
Yet not all his reporting was valid or useful. In one specific story
Riis describes Chinatown. He bluntly announces in his first paragraph,
"all attempts to make an effective Christian of John Chinaman will
remain abortive in this generation; of the next I have, if anything,
less hope. Ages of senseless idolatry, a mere grub-worship, have left
him without the essential qualities for appreciating the gentle
teachings of a faith whose motive and unselfish spirit are alike beyond
his grasp." He goes on to describe Asians as petty and greedy. This is
somewhat to be expected considering the general racial discrimination
of the time and shows Riis to be as imperfect as any other journalist
in his lack of objectivity.
Riis' photography, like his writing, maintained his cultural values. He
searched The Bend for scenes that exhibited a necessary level of shock
value, so that his readers would react to pictures of them with the
same disgust he experienced. Many of his photographs depicted filthy
women and children living in cellars and dilapidated tenements, with
hardly any belongings, hope seemingly destroyed by the harsh realities
of slum life. Other pictures were used specifically to attack the
notion of the Mother figure in a child's life. One picture shows a
mother with her naked child on a rooftop. Other pictures show children
playing on the streets completely without the attendance or supervision
of an adult. His pictures destroyed the common image of home. One
picture shows a family making cigars and another of a man eating alone
in a filthy cellar. To get his point across, Riis also photographed
deteriorating tenements.
One shortcoming of Riis' photography was his failure to emphasize the
individual. He often took pictures from a distance in order to get the
entire setting. Though Riis worked for reform, his lack of feeling for
the individual demonstrated his lack of true concern for the people he
covered. He only seems to identify his subjects when depicting them in
a condescending manner.
In the end Jacob Riis helped to eliminate The Bend, which was
demolished and turned into a park. He also helped to create laws for
better housing, education, child labor and playground construction. His
photographs captured the very worst of the New York slums and helped
create a mandate for social reform. But Riis, most famous for his
photographs, also showed a certain strength with the written word that
still catches the reader with its wit and charm. His accomplishments
will forever remain distinct in the history of journalism.
