Exposing Hidden Worlds: How Jacob Riis' Photos Became Tools for Social Reform
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
professional photographers to go with him on his nightly adventures for a short time Finally he decided to buy a camera and take pictures himself Riis first experimented with his new device in January 1888 on Hart Island a strip of land in Long Island Sound off the coast of the Bronx There the city of New York buried poor people criminals and unclaimed bodies that could not be identified The graves were in what was called a potter’s field At the time the city buried about 4,000 people there every year Looking over the potter’s field Riis saw an open trench waiting to be filled with simple wooden coffins He took a picture but he was disappointed with the resulting print He thought the image was too dark Later though when he projected it through his magic lantern the darkness gave the image more emotional power than if there had been more light Riis wrote that the darkness added a gloom to the show more realistic than any the utmost art of professional skill might have attained 6 Riis would end his lectures with a photo of gravediggers placing coffins in a common grave at a potter’s field While he was documenting life in the slums Riis prepared his first public lecture
which he called The Other Half How It Lives and Dies in New York The title was similar to a line from an 1845 report on health conditions among New York’s poor The author of that report wrote that it has often been said that one half does not know how the other half lives 7 Other authors later repeated variations of the phrase In his lecture Riis projected 100 magic lantern images and described each scene Not all of the images came from Riis or his team Some were taken from books and from the local police station where officers hung the pictures of well-known criminals in what was called the Rogue’s Gallery The images in the show included Bandit’s Roost a criminal gang sharing drinks and a rooming house that charged pennies a night to sleep there To show how the other half dies Riis included pictures of a hospital and the potter’s field Several newspapers had stories about Riis first lecture The New York Herald said the photos embraced not only the ordinary home life of tenement house dwellers but also showed vividly many scenes in which vice and brutality reigned rampant 8 The New Jersey News called the pictures shocking 9 Riis began taking his photos to New York churches hoping he could enlist them in the effort to clean up the slums Some churches however turned him down The photos startling realism which some viewers admired was too upsetting to others MAGIC LANTERNS Humans have told each other stories and created pictures for tens of thousands of years The magic lantern let storytellers combine images with their tales and they could easily take the illustrated stories from place to place The first magic lanterns were invented during the late 1600s They used candlelight to project an image from a glass plate onto a wall The light went through the lantern’s glass lens which the storyteller could focus to sharpen the image Over time magic lanterns used more powerful light sources so the images could be bigger and seen by more people Some of the earliest images showed supernatural beings such as ghosts and demons which may have led to the magic in the device’s name By the 1800s some people could afford to buy their own lanterns to use at home But many people still came to see magic lantern shows such as the ones Riis presented He wanted his shows to inform others but he knew people saw them as entertainment too Middle-class Americans were curious to see how people different from them such as poor immigrants lived Although the magic lantern lost popularity to the movies some entertainers still put on magic lantern shows with old machines
