Exposing Hidden Worlds: How Jacob Riis' Photos Became Tools for Social Reform
Chapter One INTO THE SLUMS Late on a fall night in 1887 journalist Jacob Riis headed out into the slums on the Lower East Side of New York City Riis knew these dark streets and crowded buildings well For 10 years he had roamed the city looking for stories to write for the New York Tribune newspaper He mostly wrote about police news which included reporting on crimes fires and public health and safety Riis wrote that he had covered all the news that means trouble to some one 1 Many of the people Riis saw and wrote about were immigrants From 1881 to 1890 more than 5 million immigrants came to the United States Many were poor and uneducated and they struggled to find decent jobs Large numbers came through the port of New York and then stayed there By 1890 about 40 percent of the city’s population had been born in another country Riis too was an immigrant He was born and raised in Denmark After coming to the United States he had experienced bouts of poverty and knew what it was like to be homeless As a reporter he was determined to show other Americans what life was like in the slums of the country’s largest city Riis hoped that his reporting would lead the public and government officials to work together to improve living conditions for the people who were crowded together in run-down dirty apartment buildings called tenements
Jacob Riis photo of an Italian immigrant mother and her baby appeared in his groundbreaking work that exposed the pain and suffering of New York City’s poor By the time Riis set out on that fall night in 1887 he had decided that words weren’t enough He wanted to show the brutal reality of the slums using images Drawings wouldn’t work For one thing as Riis readily admitted he couldn’t draw And illustrations he later wrote would not have been evidence of the kind I wanted 2 They would lack the realism and impact of photographs Riis who usually searched for stories at night in buildings without electric lights knew that the cameras available then couldn’t take good pictures of what he wanted to show Then he read about an invention that promised to change that Two German scientists had found that mixing three powdered chemicals and lighting them created a bright flash of light Riis along with amateur photographers in New York City realized what this could mean for photography Henry Piffard one of the other New York photographers tinkered with the mixture to make it safer to use Then he put the chemicals in a cartridge and fired them from a gun That method created a useful flash that was fairly safe Piffard belonged to a photography club along with
Richard Hoe Lawrence and John Nagle Riis knew Nagle who worked in the city’s Health Department Riis asked him about using the new technology to photograph tenements at night Nagle Piffard and Lawrence agreed to go with Riis on his first photographic missions Along with the three photographers and sometimes a police officer or two Riis wrote they set out bent on letting in the light where it was so much needed 3 He and his team often used what was called a detective camera because it was smaller than most cameras of the day The wooden box camera could be easily hidden or disguised so others wouldn’t realize what it was But Riis team scared some tenement dwellers anyway since they saw strange men enter their building with a flash gun Riis explained that it was only for photography but some people he encountered ran away Sometimes the team burst into rooms and flashed their light before people inside knew what had happened As art historian and photography scholar Bonnie Yochelson wrote those pictures retain their power today because the harsh light and haphazard compositions convey the chaos of living in poverty 4 Riis used a flash to illuminate the plight of a man who lived with three others in a filthy cellar The man slept on a plank atop two barrels
