How the Other Half Lives was a pioneering work of photojournalism by Jacob Riis, documenting the squalid living conditions in New York City slums in the 1880s. It served as a basis for future muckraking journalism by exposing the slums to New York City's upper and middle class. How The Other Half Lives quickly became a landmark in the annals of social reform. Riis documented the filth, disease, exploitation, and overcrowding that characterized the experience of more than one million immigrants. He helped push tenement reform to the front of New York's political agenda, and prompted then-Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt to close down the police-run poor houses. Roosevelt later called Riis "the most useful citizen of New York". Riis's idea inspired Jack London to write a similar exposé on London's East End, called People of the Abyss.
This famous journalistic record of the filth and degradation of New York's slums at the turn of the century is a classic in social thought and of early American photography. Over 100 photographs.
For this edition, prints have been made from RiisÕs original photographs now in the archives of the Museum of the City of New York. Endnotes aid the contemporary reader.
This famous journalistic record of the filth and degradation of New York's slums at the turn of the century is a classic in social thought and a monument of early American photography.
David Leviatin edited this complete edition of How the Other Half Lives to be as faithful to Riis's original text and photography as possible.
His father persuaded him to read (and improve his English via) Charles Dickens's magazine All the Year Round and the novels of James Fenimore Cooper.Jacob had a happy childhood, but the experienced tragedy at the age of eleven when his ...
A revisionist portrait of the late-nineteenth-century social reformer draws on previously unexamined diaries and letters to trace his immigration to America, work as a police reporter for the New York Tribune, and pivotal contributions as a ...
Yochelson focuses on how Riis came to obtain his now famous images, how they were manipulated for publication, and their influence on the young field of photography.
Abramsky shows how poverty - a massive political scandal - is dramatically changing in the wake of the Great Recession.
David Leviatin edited this complete edition of How the Other Half Lives to be as faithful to Riis's original text and photography as possible.
"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.