Jacob
Riis was born on May 3, 1849 in Ribe, Denmark before immigrating to New York in
1870. Riis struggled to find work in New York as he soon found himself begging
for food and living in police lodging houses.
After
three years of odd jobs, Riis got a job as a police reporter for the New
York Evening Sun working in the most dangerous and impoverished areas
of the city. He began to photograph his work in 1888 using the magnesium flash
powder which allowed photographs to be captured in little light. Riis is considered
to be one of the fathers of modern photojournalism as well as muckraking
journalism because of his documentation of the neighborhoods he patrolled.
Two
years later, Riis published a work of photojournalism titled, "How the
Other Half Lives" which had been a compilation of his past work over the
years. The book opened with his observations of the social and economic
situations of different racial and ethnic groups. In addition, his book
received attention from then police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt who closed
the police lodging houses and deemed Riis, "New York's most useful
citizen."
Riis
also released a follow-up volume to "How the Other Half Lives,"
titled "Children of the Poor" in 1892 along with his best-selling
autobiography, "The Making of an American" among other books.
Riis's
work inspired many including Lincoln Steffens, the man considered to be the
godfather of investigative journalism. Steffens argued in his Autobiography
published in 1931: "He not only got the news; he cared about the news. He
hated passionately all tyrannies, abuses, miseries, and he fought them. He was
a terror to the officials and landlords responsible, as he saw it, for the
desperate condition of the tenements where the poor lived. He had exposed them
in articles, books, and public speeches, and with results."
Jacob
Riis died in Barrie, Massachusetts on May 26, 1914 at the age of
sixty-five.
The
significance of Riis's work exposed the putrid living conditions of the poor to
the middle and upper classes using the early adaptions of the flash in
photography.
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