Rediscovering Jacob Riis

A 1900s New York portrait that's “an evocative and valuable reminder . . . of one unrelenting individual's ability to make a difference” (New York Times).

Before publishing How the Other Half Lives—a photojournalistic investigation into the poverty of New York's tenement houses, home to three quarters of the city's population—Jacob Riis was an itinerant laborer until he landed a job as a muckraking reporter. Experiencing what it was like to be poor in the immigrant communities that populated New York's slums, Riis's empathy would shine through in his iconic photos.

Rediscovering Jacob Riis places the photojournalist's images in historical context even as they expose a clear sightline to the present. Historian Daniel Czitrom explores Riis's reporting and activism within the gritty specifics of Gilded Age New York: its new immigrants, its political machines, its fiercely competitive journalism, its evangelical reformers, and its labor movement. In delving into Riis's intellectual education and the lasting impact of How the Other Half Lives, Czitrom shows that though Riis argued for charity, not sociopolitical justice, the empathy that drove his work continues to inspire urban reformers today.

Art historian Bonnie Yochelson describes Riis's photographic practice: his initial reliance on amateurs to take the pictures he needed, his own use of the camera, and then his collecting of images by professionals, who by 1900 were documenting social reform efforts for government agencies and charities. Riis was not a photographic artist, but a writer and lecturer who first harnessed the power of photography to affect social change.

As staggering inequality remains an urgent political topic, this book, illustrated with nearly seventy of Riis's photographs, serves as a stunning reminder of what has changed, and what has not.