Sante Luc - How the other half lives: studies among the tenements of New York

How the Other Half Lives

PENGUIN CLASSICS

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES

Jacob A. Riis (18491914) 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 (187788) and, later, the Evening Sun (188899). New Yorks police headquarters was then on Mulberry Street, in the heart of the Lower East Side slum district. As Riiss familiarity with the neighborhoods squalid living conditions deepened, he began to employ his journalistic skills to convey his revulsion to the public.

For ten years (187787) 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. Riiss 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 had captured the publics interest in the everyday life of the urban poor. Many publications followed in the wake of this path-breaking book, each incorporating the rapidly improving technology of photographic reproduction. As his reputation continued to grow nationally, Riis became a major influence in launching tenement housing reform, improving sanitary conditions, creating public parks and playgrounds, and documenting the need for more schools.

The thirty photographs reproduced in this Penguin Classics edition are drawn from The Jacob A. Riis Collection at the Museum of the City of New York. (Statement by Leslie Nolan, Curator, Prints & Photographs, reprinted courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York.)

Luc Sante was born in Verviers, Belgium, and emigrated to the United States as a child. He has lived in New York City since 1972. He is the author of Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York (1991), Evidence (1992), and The Factory of Facts (1998). He has also worked as a book, film, art, and photography critic for many publications.