Heartbreaking Jacob Riis Photographs From How The Other Half Lives And Beyond
Jacob Riis/Wikimedia Commons“In A Dive.” 1895.
Of the many photos said to have “changed the world,” there are those that simply haven’t (stunning though they may be), those that sort of have, and then those that truly have.
And few photos truly changed the world like those of Jacob Riis.
The New York City to which the poor young Jacob Riis immigrated from Denmark in 1870 was a city booming beyond belief. In the three decades leading up to his arrival, the city’s population, driven relentlessly upward by intense immigration, had more than tripled. Over the next three decades, it would nearly quadruple.
Confined to crowded, disease-ridden neighborhoods filled with ramshackle tenements that might house 12 adults in a room that was 13 feet across, New York’s immigrant poor lived a life of struggle — but a struggle confined to the slums and thus hidden from the wider public eye.
Jacob Riis changed all that. Working as a police reporter for the New-York Tribune and unsatisfied with the extent to which he could capture the city’s slums with words, Riis eventually found that photography was the tool he needed.
Starting in the 1880s, Riis ventured into the New York that few were paying attention to and documented its harsh realities for all to see. By 1890, he was able to publish his historic photo collection whose title perfectly captured just how revelatory his work would prove to be: How the Other Half Lives.
