How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (1890) was an early publication of
photojournalismPhotojournalism is a particular form of journalism that creates images in order to tell a news story. It is now usually understood to refer only to still images, but in some cases the term also refers to video used in broadcast journalism...
by
Jacob RiisJacob August Riis was a Danish American social reformer, "muckraking" journalist and social documentary photographer. He is known for using his photographic and journalistic talents to help the impoverished in New York City; those impoverished New Yorkers were the subject of most of his prolific...
, documenting squalid living conditions in
New York CityNew York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
slumA slum, as defined by United Nations agency UN-HABITAT, is a run-down area of a city characterized by substandard housing and squalor and lacking in tenure security. According to the United Nations, the percentage of urban dwellers living in slums decreased from 47 percent to 37 percent in the...
s in the 1880s. It served as a basis for future "muckraking" journalism by exposing the slums to New York City’s upper and middle classes.
History and contents
During the 1880s many people in upper- and middle-class society were unaware of the dangerous conditions in the slums among poor immigrants. Jacob Riis, an immigrant himself who could not originally find much work, hoped to expose the squalor of the 19th-century
Lower East SideThe Lower East Side, LES, is a neighborhood in the southeastern part of the New York City borough of Manhattan. It is roughly bounded by Allen Street, East Houston Street, Essex Street, Canal Street, Eldridge Street, East Broadway, and Grand Street....
of Manhattan. After a successful career as a police reporter he decided to publish a photojournal documenting these conditions using graphic descriptions, sketches, photographs, and statistics. Riis blamed the apathy of the monied class for the condition of the New York slums, and assumed that as people were made more aware of these conditions they would be motivated to help eradicate them.
In 1889 Riis wrote a magazine article exposing some of the harsh conditions of New York slums which was published with a number of engravings of his photographs. The article proved to be popular and Riis spent the better part of a year expanding it into the book How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York. The book was also successful. Soon after its publication, the New York Times lauded its content, claiming it to be a “powerful book”.
The title of the book is a reference to a sentence by French writer
François RabelaisFrançois Rabelais was a major French Renaissance writer, doctor, Renaissance humanist, monk and Greek scholar. He has historically been regarded as a writer of fantasy, satire, the grotesque, bawdy jokes and songs...
, who famously wrote in
PantagruelThe Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel is a connected series of five novels written in the 16th century by François Rabelais. It is the story of two giants, a father and his son and their adventures, written in an amusing, extravagant, satirical vein...
: "one half of the world does not know how the other half lives" ("la moitié du monde ne sait pas comment l'autre vit").
Riis was a police reporter who had himself known poverty. In How the Other Half Lives he describes the system of tenement housing that had failed, as he claims, due to greed and neglect from wealthier people. He claims a correlation between the high crime rate, drunkenness and reckless behaviour of the poor and their lack of a proper home. Chapter by chapter he uses his words and photographs to expose the conditions inhabited by the poor in a manner that “spoke directly to people's hearts”.
He ends How the Other Half Lives with a plan of how to fix the problem. He asserts that the plan is achievable and that the upper classes will not only profit financially from such ventures, but have a moral obligation to tend to them as well.
Due to the recent invention of
flash photographyA flash is a device used in photography producing a flash of artificial light at a color temperature of about 5500 K to help illuminate a scene. A major purpose of a flash is to illuminate a dark scene. Other uses are capturing quickly moving objects or changing the quality of light...
, Riis was able to photograph the unlit areas of tenements and expose wretched working and living conditions. The harsh white light from magnesium
flash powderFlash powder is a pyrotechnic composition, a mixture of oxidizer and metallic fuel, which burns quickly and if confined produces a loud report. It is widely used in theatrical pyrotechnics and fireworks and was once used for flashes in photography.Different varieties of flash powder are made from...
often caused a look of shock on the faces of those photographed and was accepted as an indication of candid and objective photography. Riis gained credibility from this effect and from the spontaneous appearance of the newly introduced
snapshotA snapshot is popularly defined as a photograph that is "shot" spontaneously and quickly, most often without artistic or journalistic intent. Snapshots are commonly considered to be technically "imperfect" or amateurish—out of focus or poorly framed or composed...
.
Riis was an immigrant himself who had worked as a police reporter when he made the book.
How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York explained not only the living conditions in New York slums, but also the
sweatshopSweatshop is a negatively connoted term for any working environment considered to be unacceptably difficult or dangerous. Sweatshop workers often work long hours for very low pay, regardless of laws mandating overtime pay or a minimum wage. Child labour laws may be violated. Sweatshops may have...
s in some tenements which paid workers only a few cents a day. The book explains the plight of working children; they would work in factories and at other jobs. Some children became garment workers and newsies (newsboys).
How The Other Half Lives and other works of Riis were greatly influenced by the reporting of
Charles DickensCharles John Huffam Dickens was an English novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian period. Dickens enjoyed a wider popularity and fame than had any previous author during his lifetime, and he remains popular, having been responsible for some of English literature's most iconic...
, whom Riis admired for his stories of London’s poor. Much of Riis’s writing style is similar to Dickens', who used first-person encounters to expose the “other half”.
Literature
- Marien, Mary Warner. “Photography: A Cultural History.” Syracuse University, New York, 2002.
External links