Jacob A. Riis — How the Other Half Lives (Penguin Classics)

NY: Penguin Classics. Later edition, first printing. 256 pp., 17x11. Condition: Fine (F). Mnimal toning to paper else fine. List of IllustrationsIntroduction by Luc SanteSuggestions for Further ReadingA Note on the TextHow the Other Half LivesPrefaceIntroduction1 Genesis of the Tenement2 The Awakening3 The Mixed Crowd4 The Down Town Back-alleys5 The Italian in New York6 The Bend7 A Raid on the Stale-beer Dives8 The Cheap Lodging-houses9 Chinatown10 Jewtown11 The Sweaters of Jewtown12 The Bohemians — Tenement-house Cigarmaking13 The Color Line in New York14 The Common Herd15 The Problem of the Children16 Waifs of the City’s Slums17 The Street Arab18 The Reign of Rum19 The Harvest of Tares20 The Working Girls of New York21 Pauperism in the Tenements22 The Wrecks and the Waste23 The Man with the Knife24 What Has Been Done25 How the Case StandsAppendixExplanatory NotesPENGUIN CLASSICSHOW THE OTHER HALF LIVESJacob A. Riis (1849–1914) was the first reformer to effectively convey to a wide public the unacceptable nature of living conditions endured by the urban poor. His use of the relatively new medium of photography brought an unprecedented power to his message.In 1870 Riis, born in Ribe, Denmark, 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, the shelters of last resort in late nineteenth-century New York. 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, later, 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’s familiarity with the neighborhood’s squalid living conditions deepened, he began to employ his journalistic skills to convey his revulsion to the public.For ten years (1877–87) Riis wrote and lectured stressing his view that the poor were victims rather than makers of their fate, a concept then emerging among social reformers. However, despite his considerable rhetorical skills and instructional use of statistics, architectural plans, and maps, Riis was unable to communicate the elemental shock he felt on his nightly sorties through the worst slums. It was the 1887 invention of flash photography — which allowed photographs to be taken in the darkest tenements — that provided Riis with a powerful new resource. Initially employing amateur and professional photographers, and later on his own, Riis photographed the horrors of slum life specifically to shift prevailing public opinion from passive acceptance to a realization that such living conditions must be improved.Armed with this visual evidence, Riis added “magic lantern” slide shows to his lectures. Local newspapers reported that his viewers moaned, shuddered, fainted, 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. Riis’s predominantly middle-class audiences may never have experienced slum life, but they immediately understood it as a severe and intolerable threat to human dignity. But for Riis, even the verisimilitude of photography, made doubly powerful by the novelty of the medium, 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. But some of the boys can be seen smiling slyly at the camera. They know the picture is posed.Once technical methods were developed for printing photographs with integrated text, Riis condensed his magic lantern shows into a series of half-tone photographic illustrations (together with line drawings) for his first book, How the Other Half Lives (1890). Its runaway success proved that he...