Exposing Hidden Worlds: How Jacob Riis' Photos Became Tools for Social Reform
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
A magic lantern was an early form of a slide projector Riis carried on finding places in nearby states where he could deliver his talk and show his pictures But he wanted to reach a larger audience He asked editors of several national magazines whether they wanted to print his pictures and the stories that went with them Finally one editor agreed to publish his work The December 1889 issue of Scribner’s Magazine carried an article by Riis called How the Other Half Lives Studies Among the Tenements It was illustrated by woodcut engravings of his photos Riis described life in Mulberry Bend and similar neighborhoods focusing on the ethnic groups settling in the city He told of children left to roam the streets and families who turned their cramped rooms into factories Business owners hired them to make such things as cigars or clothing at home The newcomers were not bad people Riis said They were just struggling to find good jobs and decent places to live Riis hoped to show others the harsh conditions the immigrants faced so they would take steps to improve them With his work Riis became the first muckraker a journalist who exposes the muck filth of society to try to bring change The term was not first used until the early 1900s years after How the
Other Half Lives was published But Riis work helped pave the way for the muckrakers who followed him A whole movement to improve conditions for the poor workers and immigrants had begun by the early 1900s It was known as the Progressive Movement and Riis played an important role in its rise Riis expanded the Scribner’s article into a book How the Other Half Lives Studies Among the Tenements of New York described the history of housing in New York City and the slow conversion of fine older homes into crowded apartments Cheap new homes were built near them The resulting slums he wrote led to the spread of sickness and the rise of crime Riis called for enforcing the laws that covered housing and for building new tenements with better living conditions In How the Other Half Lives Riis wrote that brothers John 10 left and Willie 8 told police they didn’t live nowhere Riis continued that they never went to school could neither read nor write Their twelve-year-old sister kept house for the father who turned the boys out to beg or steal or starve 10
