Exposing Hidden Worlds: How Jacob Riis' Photos Became Tools for Social Reform
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
Riis hoped to use the pictures to produce what was called a magic lantern show He already had done shows with this early kind of slide projector for more than 10 years The lantern projected the photo on a wall or curtain large enough for many people to see at once and Riis explained the image While he was working on putting a show together Riis and his team were drawing interest from other newspapers In February 1888 two New York papers ran stories about Riis work and printed woodcuts based on his photographs At the time few newspapers illustrated their stories Those that did sometimes used pen drawings The woodcut engravings were copies of the images Riis team members had made with their cameras The technology to allow newspapers to easily print vivid photographs was still years away Some of the best-known photographs associated with Riis were made during his early trips into the slums One of the most famous of the first pictures is called Bandit’s Roost It shows an alley with that name off of Mulberry Street The street formed one border of an area known as Mulberry Bend one of the worst slums in the city It was near the larger Five Points neighborhood which had long been known for its poverty and crime Riis knew Mulberry Bend well because his office was on Mulberry Street and he often explored alleys like Bandit’s Roost Riis said that during his 20 years of reporting on crime the neighborhood had appeared in police reports every week generally in connection with a crime of violence a murder or a stabbing 5 According to city records only two dozen of the hundreds of tenements in the area were in decent condition
Bandit’s Roost Riis 1888 photo of a Lower East Side street gang was taken at 59 1 2 Mulberry Street in Manhattan It was in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in New York City In the Bandit’s Roost photo a tough-looking man stands in the foreground On either side of the picture are walls of tenements reflecting the crowded nature of the alley and others like it Other neighborhood residents stand around or lean out of windows None of them may have been criminals despite the name of the picture and the alley But the image shows people who seem unhappy with their surroundings or perhaps with being photographed Riis work was tied to his interest in improving the living conditions of people who could not afford decent housing Nagle and the other photographers however simply wanted to show what the new flash technology could do for photographers Using the negatives the photographers could make prints But the photographers grew tired of the late-night trips into the slums Wanting to press on with his mission Riis hired two
