How The Other Half Lives 1890 By Jacob Riis

This famous journalistic record of the filth and degradation of New York's slums at the turn of the century is a classic in social thought and of early American photography. Over 100 photographs.

This famous journalistic record of the filth and degradation of New York's slums at the turn of the century is a classic in social thought and a monument of early American photography. Captured on film by photographer, journalist, and reformer Jacob Riis, more than 100 grim scenes reveal man's struggle to survive.

Jacob Riis's famed 1890 photo-text addressed the problems of tenement housing, immigration, and urban life and work at the beginning of the Progressive era. David Leviatin edited this complete edition of How the Other Half Lives to be as faithful to Riis's original text and photography as possible. Uncropped prints of Riis's original photographs replace the faded halftones and drawings from photographs that were included in the 1890 edition. Related documents added to the second edition include a stenographic report of one of Riis's lantern-slide lectures that demonstrates Riis's melodramatic techniques and the reaction of his audience, and five drawings that reveal the subtle but important ways Riis's photographs were edited when they were reinterpreted as illustrations in the 1890 edition. The book's provocative introduction now addresses Riis's ethnic and racial stereotyping and includes a map of New York's Lower East Side in the 1890s. A new list of illustrations and expanded chronology, questions for consideration, and selected bibliography provide additional support.

Jacob August Riis ( May 3, 1849 - May 26, 1914) 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 writings and photography. He endorsed the implementation of "model tenements" in New York with the help of humanitarian Lawrence Veiller. Additionally, as one of the most famous proponents of the newly practicable casual photography, he is considered one of the fathers of photography due to his very early adoption of flash in photography. While living in New York, Riis experienced poverty and became a police reporter writing about the quality of life in the slums. He attempted to alleviate the bad living conditions of poor people by exposing their living conditions to the middle and upper classes. Early life: Born in Ribe, Denmark, Jacob Riis was the third of the 15 children (one of whom, an orphaned niece, was fostered) of Niels Edward Riis, a schoolteacher and writer for the local Ribe newspaper, and Carolina Riis (née Bendsine Lundholm), a homemaker. Among the 15, only Jacob, one sister, and the foster sister survived into the twentieth century. Riis was influenced by his father, whose school Riis delighted in disrupting. His father persuaded him to read (and improve his English via) Charles Dickens's magazine All the Year Round and the novels of James Fenimore Cooper. Jacob had a happy childhood, but the experienced tragedy at the age of eleven when his brother Theodore, a year younger, drowned. He never forgot his mother's grief. At age eleven or twelve, he donated all the money he had and gave it to a poor Ribe family living in a squalid house if they cleaned it. The tenants took the money and obliged; when he told his mother, she went to help. Though his father had hoped that Jacob would have a literary career, Jacob wanted to be a carpenter.When he was 16, he became fond of Elisabeth Gjørtz, the 12-year-old adopted daughter of the owner of the company for which he worked as an apprentice carpenter. The father disapproved of the boy's blundering attentions, and Riis was forced to complete his carpentry apprenticeship in Copenhagen. Riis returned to Ribe in 1868 at age 19. Discouraged by poor job availability in the region and Gjørtz's disfavor of his marriage proposal, Riis decided to emigrate to the United States.

Since 1959 The John Harvard Library has been instrumental in publishing essential American writings in authoritative editions. Jacob RiisÕs pioneering work of photojournalism takes its title from RabelaisÕs Pantagruel: ÒOne half of the world knoweth not how the other half liveth; considering that no one has yet written of that Country.Ó An anatomy of New York CityÕs slums in the 1880s, it vividly brought home to its first readers through the powerful combination of text and images the squalid living conditions of Òthe other half,Ó who might well have inhabited another country. The book pricked the conscience of its readers and raised the tenement into a symbol of intransigent social difference. As Alan Trachtenberg makes clear in his introduction, it is a book that still speaks powerfully to us today of social injustice. Except for the modernization of spelling and punctuation, the John Harvard Library edition of How the Other Half Lives reproduces the text of the first published book version of November 1890. For this edition, prints have been made from RiisÕs original photographs now in the archives of the Museum of the City of New York. Endnotes aid the contemporary reader.