Jacob Riis's Reform Photography

Jacob Riis worked as a social reformer from the early 1880s into the first decade of the 20th century. His photographs-- including those he'd commissioned from professionals and amateurs, borrowed from other sources, and purchased from commercial firms-- span the period from 1888 until about 1907. Few have been accurately dated; those that have will have their dates below. Clicking on a smaller image often brings up a larger version, slower to load but more useful for presentations or printouts.

Photographer unknown, commissioned by Jacob Riis, "Prayer Time at the Five Points House of Industry," 1888-1889, as reproduced in halftone in How The Other Half Lives 1890

Riis's photographic odyssey can be seen in two ways: as a chronological narrative in which he understands the medium, exploits it with greater finesse, while simultaneously his reformer ideology undergoes increasingly sophisticated and expansive transformation; or as a narrative he might present in book or lecture form. This picture, one of the first he commissioned, suggests his thinking at an early stage: photography could combine sentiment and realism, and the package could be converted to halftone reproduction and used in a book.

Jacob Riis or associates, "Hunting River Thieves, New York," ca. 1890.

By contrast, this picture of police hunting "river rats" or boat thieves, is typical of the ways he might open his lectures-- though they were more like sermons, and often given in the public lecture rooms of Protestant churches. Here the audience was invited to enter the dark mysteries of the city and see its hidden "other half," accompanied by a trustworthy and knowledgeable guide (Riis himself) and protected by distance and the power of the camera from actual confrontation.

Jacob Riis, "Bandit's Roost," ca. 1890.

This startling view, however, represents the increasingly confrontational relationship Riis built up between his middle-class viewers and the subjects of view. While Riis was undoubtedly racist and patronizing by contemporary standards, his overriding empathy for the circumstances of his poverty-stricken subjects, and his belief that environment made or at least contributed to criminal and antisocial behavior, pushed him toward pictures like these. Here the viewer is confronted by a myriad of faces, blank, hostile, threatening, in a dark alley. Surely it's no wonder that Victorians fainted, cried, called out to the lantern-slide screen, or had to be led from the lecture hall: these pictures were, after all, life size or larger in many cases, and this confrontational visual event was unprecedented.

halftone engraved newspaper print of "Bandit's Roost" as it appeared in the New York Sun in an article titled "Flashes from the Slums, in 1889.

Contrast that version with this one, a tiny wood engraving in a half-page spread in the New YOrk Sun newspaper for which Riis served as a police reporter (Click on the image to see the entire newspaper spread). Clearly halftones weren't as impressive as the original lantern-slide images, but they were far more convincing than the older technology of wood engraving.

Jacob Riis, "A Cave Dweller, One of 4 Pedlars Who Slept..." ca. 1890

Riis's reform argument targeted six major areas: men, women, children, workplaces, living and housingconditions, and improvements, real and imagined. Here he used the photograph to advance the linkage between impossibly inhumane living conditions, and the brutalization of the poor.

Jacob Riis, "Minding Baby, Cherry Hill," ca. 1890

When Riis himself photographed, he was often formally inept but rhetorically brilliant. Here the tilted frame and the abrupt cropping were probably the result of his single-minded attention to the children; nevertheless, the picture's strength remained a product of its formal instability, even when the publishers "corrected" it, to some extent,in the book illustration.

Riis's images of children were divided into three broad categories-- innocents and angels, like these; children threatened by their environment and its inhumanities; and children already corrupted into criminality by the failure of a larger society to correct the influences upon them-- as in this picture of "A Growler Gang," probably wrongly titled, showing a group of young boys seemingly rifling the pockets of a drunk:

Jacob Riis, "A Growler Gang," ca. 1889.

In this image, we can clearly see the limits of Riis's verisimilitude-- the scene is obviously staged, and the drunkard is one of the boys.

Jacob Riis, "Italian Mother and Baby, Ragpicker, New York," ca. 1889-1890.

This is arguably Riis's most famous image: it reeks of sentimentalism, refers directly to the sort of Sunday-school chromolithographs one might find at the time, and yet is chock-full of emblematic details. As a translation of a religious painting, it has often been renamed the "Slum Madonna." But the smaller details-- the dustpan and broom at the lower left, and the mountain of work on the stove to the right, combined with Riis's own hat, strategically placed to serve as a surrogate halo, makes the picture compelling nonetheless.

Jacob Riis, "The Bohemian Cigarmakers at Home," ca. 1890-92.

Families forced to piecework in their own homes were notorious violations of Victorian ideals of home, family, and the separation of spheres. In this case, Riis chose a particularly compelling example, for the making of cigars introduced the vice of tobacco to children and even infants, in the eyes of Riis and his Victorian audience.

Jacob Riis or associate, page from "The Battle with the Slum," 1902

Riis's first book, How The Other Half Lives, was published in 1890 to sensational response. He'd been honing his argument in lectures and articles, but it was the addition of finely-made wood engravings alternating with genuine halftone reproductions (like the one above, "Prayer-Time..."), inserted with statistics, schematic views of tenements, and sentimental stories, that formed the basis for the reform-documentary tradition thereafter. By 1902, Riis was midway through a multiple-book contract, and his writing and photography had begun to show the wear of overproduction. Nonetheless, there were patches of brilliance in each book and, as the work progressed, Riis had more and more resources to draw from in illustrating the beneficial effect of housing renewal, park and school building, and social services. Here, for example, he shows poor immigrant children in organized healthful play, successfully entering the mainstream of the American Dream.