Jacob Riis

Jacob Riis emigrated from Denmark to the United States in 1870 and knew poverty first-hand before becoming a reporter^*1. As a police reporter for the New York Evening Sun, he confronted the overcrowded tenements of the Lower East Side and began using flash photography to show interiors that words alone could not convey^*2. His 1890 book How the Other Half Lives forced middle-class readers to confront immigrant housing conditions visually and became a landmark in reform photography. Theodore Roosevelt was deeply influenced by it, and Riis became one of the earliest photographers to use the medium deliberately as an instrument of social change^*1. At the same time, his work is now also examined critically for the stereotypes it could reinforce about immigrant communities^*2.