Jacob Ris (1849-1914)

Danish born Riis (1849-1914) was a pioneer in social documentary photography which included identifiable people and was one of the first to use the new technology of magnesium flash. Riis photographed the flop houses where people were stacked at night on every available horizontal space. Again these were where usually immigrants and Riis showed the squalor they inhabited in his book How the Other Half Lives (1890) which featured the infamous Mulberry tenements in New York.

How the Other Half Lives - Jacob Riis
This video, How the Other Half Lives, shows, through the photographs taken by Jacob Riis, tenement housing and life in New York City at the end of the 19th century, it gives an insight into immigrant life in the US after the influx of the 'new' immigrants. It looks at the public neglect and the private greed, it was described as 'scarcely fit to house brutes', Riis was able to show the extreme deprevation which would prompt the viewer to think is life worth living?

This video looks at the life of Jacob Riis, who had first hand experience of living in the slums of New York and had at times become so low that he'd had thoughts of suicide. After finding some work as a police reporter and after years of recording life in the slums, he's seen 'sights that had gripped his heart' and he had to show the world what he'd seen. His images of the tenements had been too dark to show any detail, until the new magnesium flash was invented in 1887, when he could take photo's deep into the tenements. He produced the book How the Other Half Lives, which brought middle class and wealthy new yorkers face to face with the reality that most had fought to avoid.

The tenements housed over one million of the most overworked and undernourished people in the world. Riis was especially moved by the young, the ragedy street workers who sold newspapers by day and slept in doorways at night, and the tens of thousands of abandoned and orphaned children horrified him the most. The unspeakable conditions that these new yorkers were forced to live in were the worse than anything seen in the US before.

There was no law governing the tenements, that started in the mid 19th century. The people there were pray to all types of disease and up to 20 thousand a year died of tuberculosis, it was no wonder that people became depraved, alcoholics and criminals. Riis wanted to awaken new yorkers like nothing else had, he wanted a new way of seeing the world. Riis used photography and his book to not only express his outrage but to also spur people into action. His book made a lot of people want to improve life in the city. Theodore Rosevelt called in to see him at his office when Riis was out, but he left his calling card with a message that said 'I have read your book and I have come to help'.