In 1870, 21-year-old Jacob Riis immigrated from his home in Denmark to bustling New York City. With only $40, a gold locket housing the hair of the girl he had left behind, and dreams of working as a carpenter, he sought a better life in the United States of America. Unfortunately, when he arrived in the city, he immediately faced a myriad of obstacles.
As he excelled at his work, he soon made a name for himself at various other newspapers, including the New-York Tribune where he was hired as a police reporter. Faced with documenting the life he knew all too well, he used his writing as a means to expose the plight, poverty, and hardships of immigrants. Eventually, he longed to paint a more detailed picture of his firsthand experiences, which he felt he could not properly capture through prose. So, he made a life-changing decision: he would teach himself photography.
As he excelled at his work, he soon made a name for himself at various other newspapers, including the New-York Tribune where he was hired as a police reporter. Faced with documenting the life he knew all too well, he used his writing as a means to expose the plight, poverty, and hardships of immigrants. Eventually, he longed to paint a more detailed picture of his firsthand experiences, which he felt he could not properly capture through prose. So, he made a life-changing decision: he would teach himself photography.
Riis soon began to photograph the slums, saloons, tenements, and streets that New York City’s poor reluctantly called home. Often shot at night with the newly-available flash function—a photographic tool that enabled Riis to capture legible photos of dimly lit living conditions—the photographs presented a grim peek into life in poverty to an oblivious public.
In 1890, Riis compiled his photographs into a book, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York. Featuring never-before-seen photos supplemented by blunt and unsettling descriptions, the treatise opened New Yorkers’ eyes to the harsh realities of their city’s slums. Since its publication, the book has been consistently credited as a key catalyst for social reform, with Riis’ belief “that every man’s experience ought to be worth something to the community from which he drew it, no matter what that experience may be, so long as it was gleaned along the line of some decent, honest work” at its core.
Photographer Jacob Riis pioneered social reform through his photographs of everyday life in New York City’s slums.
Hester Street
Riis often photographed the decrepit conditions of the tenements.
Dens of Death, New York
An Old Rear Tenement in Roosevelt Street
Bottle Alley, Mulberry Road
Bottle Alley, Mulberry Bend
Bunks in a Seven-Cent Lodging House, Pell Street
Additionally, his photographs include many upsetting shots of immigrants and poor people simply struggling to get by.
Room in a Tenement
Blind Beggar
Five Cents Lodging, Bayard Street
Bohemian Cigarmakers at Work in their Tenement
Fighting Tuberculosis on the Roof
The Short Tail Gang Under a Pier
Family Making Artificial Flowers
In Sleeping Quarters – Rivington Street Dump
Home of an Italian Ragpicker
…Including impoverished children.
Minding Baby, Cherry Hill
Didn’t Live Nowhere
Drilling the Gang on Mulberry Street
Children’s Playground in Poverty Cap, New York
In the Sun Office, 3 AM
Girl and a Baby on a Doorstep
Riis published his photographs in a book, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York.
Pupils in the Essex Market Schools in a Poor Quarter of New York
The Baby’s Playground
This treatise brought attention to the issue and helped pioneer social reform in New York City.
Street Arabs in their Sleeping Quarters
Girl from the West 52 Street Industrial School
Boys from the Italian Quarter
