The impoverished: a century apart in pictures

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), July, 1995 by Leslie Nolan

During the late 19th century, social reformer and journalist Jacob Riis exposed the misery of slum life through his poignant, often shocking pictures. In contrasting his photos with the works of contemporary photographers, have things really changed that much?

JACOB A. RIIS was the first reformer to convey effectively to a wide public the unacceptable nature of living conditions endured by the urban poor. Riis, considered America's first photojournalist, used his camera to arouse the public about poverty in late-19th-century New York. Riis' pictures were even more powerful than his written words. His use of the relatively new medium of photography gave his message unprecedented power.

In 1870, 21-year-old Riis arrived in New York as a Danish immigrant, one among thousands of the poor, friendless, and unskilled. Like so many, he frequently spent nights in police station lodging houses, then the shelters of last resort. He soon left the city to work at an assortment of rural jobs, but returned in 1877 to find steady employment as a police reporter for the Tribune (1877-88) and the Evening Sun (1888-99). New York's police headquarters was then on Mulberry Street, in the heart of the Lower East Side slum district. As Riis became familiar with the squalid living conditions of the area, he began to employ his journalistic skills to convey his revulsion to the public.

From 1877 to 1887, Riis wrote and lectured, stressing his view that the poor were victims, rather than makers of their fate, a revolutionary concept then emerging among social reformers. Despite his considerable rhetorical skills and instructional use of statistics, architectural plans, and maps, he was hard-pressed to communicate the elemental shock he felt on his nightly sorties through the worst slums.

Later, in his 1902 autobiography, The Making of an American, he expressed his feelings: "It was upon my midnight trips with the sanitary police that the wish kept cropping up in me that there were some way of putting before the people what I saw there. A drawing might have done it, but I cannot draw, never could.... But, anyway, a drawing would not have been evidence of the kind I wanted. We used to go in the small hours of the morning into the worst tenements to count noses and see if the law against overcrowding was violated, and the sights I saw there gripped my heart until I felt that I must tell of them, or burst, or turn anarchist, or something. `A man may be a man even in a palace' in modem New York as in ancient Rome, but not in a slum tenement

Riis had not considered buying a camera to document the misery he observed since those then available were effective only in broad daylight. It was the invention of flash photography in 1887-which allowed pictures to be taken in the darkest tenements that provided him with a powerful new resource. Initially employing amateur and professional photographers, and later on his own, Riis captured the horror of slum life specifically to shift prevailing public opinion from passive acceptance to a realization that living conditions must be improved.

As he indicated in The Making of an American, "What with one thing and another, and in spite of all obstacles, I got my pictures, and put some them to practical use at once. I recall a midnight expedition to the Mulberry Bend with the sanitary police that had turned up a couple of characteristic cases of overcrowding. In one instance two rooms that should at most have held four or five sleepers were found to contain fifteen, a week-old baby among them. Most of them were lodgers and slept there for `five cents a spot.' There was no pretence of beds. When the report was submitted to the Health Board the next day, it did not make much of an impression--these things rarely do, put in mere words--until my negatives, still dripping from the dark-room, came to reinforce them. From them there was no appeal. It was not the only instance of the kind by a good many. Neither the landlord's protests nor the tenant's plea went in face of the camera's evidence, and I was satisfied."

Armed with this visual evidence, Riis added "magic lantern" slide shows to his lectures. Local newspapers reported that his viewers moaned, shuddered, fainted, and even talked to the photographs he projected, reacting to the slides not as images, but as a virtual reality that transported the New York slum world directly into the lecture hall. The predominantly middle-class audiences may never have experienced slum life, but they immediately understood it as a severe and intolerable threat to human dignity. For Riis, though, the realism, of photography, made doubly powerful by its novelty, was not enough. At times, he manipulated his subjects in an attempt to heighten the impact of his pictures. In some of his photographs, for example, young boys huddle over a ventilation grate as though it is their only refuge against the cold. A few can be seen smiling slyly at the camera, knowing that the picture is posed. Riis's reputation continued to grow, and he became a major influence in launching tenement housing reform, improving sanitary conditions, creating public parks and playgrounds, and documenting the need for more schools.