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The definitive study of the images made by a pioneer journalist and
photographer who passionately advocated for America’s urban poor
Danish-born Jacob A. Riis (1849–1914) found success in America as
a reporter for the New York Tribune, first documenting crime and
later turning his eye to housing reform. As tenement living
conditions became unbearable in the wake of massive immigration,
Riis and his camera captured some of the earliest, most powerful
images of American urban poverty. Â This important
publication is the first comprehensive study and complete catalogue
of Riis’s world-famous images, and places him at the forefront of
early-20th-century social reform photography. It is the culmination
of more than two decades of research on Riis, assembling materials
from five repositories (the Riis Collection at the Museum of the
City of New York, the Library of Congress, the New-York Historical
Society, the New York Public Library, and the Museum of South
West Jutland, Denmark) as well as previously unpublished
photographs and notes. In this handsome volume, Bonnie Yochelson
proposes a novel thesis—that Riis was a radical publicist who
utilized photographs to enhance his arguments, but had no great
skill or ambition as a photographer. She also provides important
context for understanding how Riis’s work would be viewed in
turn-of-the-century New York, whether presented in lantern slide
lectures or newspapers. Â Published in association with the
Museum of the City of New York Exhibition Schedule: Museum of the
City of New York (10/07/15–03/20/16) Library of Congress,
Washington D.C. (April–September 2016)
Before publishing his pioneering book "How the Other Half Lives"--a
photojournalistic investigation into the poverty of New York's
tenement houses, home to three quarters of the city's
population--Jacob Riis (1849-1914) spent his first years in the
United States as an immigrant and itinerant laborer, barely
surviving on his carpentry skills until he landed a job as a
muckraking reporter. These early experiences provided Riis with an
understanding of what it was like to be poor in the immigrant
communities that populated New York's slums, and it was this
empathy that would shine through in his iconic photos.
With "Rediscovering Jacob Riis," art historian Bonnie Yochelson
and historian Daniel Czitrom place Jacob Riis's images in
historical context even as they expose a clear sightline to the
present. In the first half of their book, Czitrom explores Riis's
reporting and activism within the gritty specifics of Gilded Age
New York: its new immigrants, its political machines, its fiercely
competitive journalism, its evangelical reformers, and its labor
movement. In delving into Riis's intellectual education and the
lasting impact of "How the Other Half Lives," Czitrom shows that
though Riis argued for charity, not sociopolitical justice, the
empathy that drove his work continues to inspire urban reformers
today.
In the second half of the book, Yochelson describes for the first
time Riis's photographic practice: his initial reliance on amateur
photographers to take the photographs he needed, his own use of the
camera, and then his collecting of photographs by professionals,
who by 1900 were documenting social reform efforts for government
agencies and charities. She argues that while Riis is rightly
considered a revolutionary in the history of photography, he was
not a photographic artist. Instead, Riis was a writer and lecturer
who first harnessed the power of photography to affect social
change.
As staggering inequality continues to be an urgent political
topic, this book, illustrated with nearly seventy of Riis's
photographs, will serve as a stunning reminder of what has changed,
and what has not.
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