Jacob Riis (Jacob August Riis) Text from Wikipedia
Jacob August Riis (May 3, 1849 - May 26, 1914), a Danish-American muckraker journalist, photographer, and social reformer, was born in Ribe, Denmark. He is known for his dedication to using his photographic and journalistic talents to help the less fortunate in New York City, which was the subject of most of his prolific writings and photographic essays. As one of the first photographers to use flash photography, he is considered a pioneer in the field of photography.
Early life
Jacob Riis was the third of fifteen children born to Niels Riis, schoolteacher and editor of his local newspaper, and Carolina Riis, a homemaker. Riis was influenced both by his stern father, whose school Riis took delight in disrupting, and from the authors he read, among whom Charles Dickens and James Fenimore Cooper were his favorites.[1] At age eleven, Riis's younger brother drowned. Riis would be haunted for the rest of his life, both by images of his drowning brother, and those of his mother staring at his brother's empty chair at the dinner table.[1] At twelve, Riis amazed all who knew him when he donated all the money he received for Christmas to a poor family in Ribe, during a time when money was scarce for anyone his age. When Riis was sixteen, he fell in love with wealthy local Elisabeth Gortz, but his marriage suit was denied, because Gortz's family thought Riis too common. Riis moved to Copenhagen in dismay, seeking work as a carpenter.
Immigration to the United States
Riis came to America by steamer in 1870, when he was 21 seeking employment as a carpenter. Riis arrived in the United States during an era of social turmoil. Large groups of migrants and immigrants flooded urban areas in the years following the U.S. Civil War seeking prosperity in a more industrialized environment. Twenty-four million people moved to urban centers, causing a population increase of over 700%. The demographics of American urban centers grew significantly more heterogeneous as immigrant groups arrived in waves, creating ethnic enclaves oftentimes surpassing even the largest cities associated with the homelands of these ethnicities. Riis's only companion was a stray dog he met shortly after his arrival. The dog brought him inspiration and when a police officer mericilessly beat his dog to death, Riis was devastated. One of his personal victories, he later confessed, was not using his eventual fame to ruin the career of the offending officer. Riis spent most of his nights in police-run poor houses, whose conditions were so ghastly that Riis dedicated himself to shutting them down.
Journalism career
Riis held various jobs before he landed a position as a police reporter in 1873 with the New York Evening Sun newspaper. In 1874, he joined the Brooklyn News's news bureau. In 1877 he again server as police reporter, this time for the New York Tribune. During these stints as a police reporter, Riis worked the most crime-ridden and impoverished slums of the city. Through his own experiences in the poor houses, and witnessing the conditions of the poor in the city slums, he decided to make a difference for those who had no voice. As a pioneer investigative journalist, he went undercover working at a meat packing factory. He was one of the first Americans to use flash powder, allowing his documentation of New York City slums to penetrate the dark of night. This technology helped him capture the hardships faced by the poor and criminal along his police beats, especially on the notorious Mulberry Street. In 1889, Scribner's Magazine published Riis's photographic essay on city life, which Riis later expanded to create his magnum opus How the Other Half Lives. This work was directly responsible for convincing then-Commissioner of Police Theodore Roosevelt to close the police-run poor houses in which Riis suffered during his first months as an American. After reading it, Roosevelt was so deeply moved with Riis's sense of justice that he met Riis and befriended him for life, calling him "the best American I ever knew." Roosevelt himself coined the term muckraking journalism, of which Riis is a recognized example, in 1906.
Marriages and later life
At age 25, Riis wrote to Elisabeth Gortz Nielsen to propose a second time. This time Gortz accepted, and joined Riis in New York City, saying "We will strive together for all that is noble and good". Indeed, Gortz did support Riis in his work, and he spent the next 25 years using his artistic medium to advance the concerns of the poor. During this time, Riis wrote another twelve works, including his autobiography The Making of an American in 1901. In 1905, his wife grew ill and died. In 1907, Riis remarried, and with his new wife Mary Phillips, moved to a farm in Barre, Massachusetts.
Text by Ansel Adams, preface to "Jacob A. Riis, Photographer & Citizen"
"To my list of intense experiences in photography, including a preview of some Strand negatives in Taos, the Portraits and Shells of Weston, the Equivalents of Stieglitz and the magnificent human affirmation of Dorothea Lange, I must add the Riis-Alland prints displayed at the Museum of the City of New York.
"For me these are magnificent achievements in the field of humanistic photography ... I know of no contemporary work of this general character which gives such an impression of competence, integrity and intensity.
"I find it difficult to explain my convictions. I am not thinking of Riis's achievement in terms of comparative equipment and materials (that is a line worn thin by now). Obviously, Alland's beautiful prints, by exalting the physical qualities of Riis's work, intensify their expressive content. The factual and dated content of subject has definite historic importance, but the larger content lies in Riis's expression of people in misery, want and squalor. These people live again for you in the print - as intensely as when their images were captured on the old dry plates of ninety years ago. Their comrades in poverty and suppression live here today, in this city - in all the cities of the world. I have thought much about this intense, living quality in Riis's work; I think I have an explanation of its compelling power. It is because in viewing those prints I find myself identified with the people photographed. I am walking in their alleys, standing in their rooms and sheds and workshops, looking in and out of their windows. And they in turn seem to be aware of me.
"In so much photography of people in our time I feel that the photographer is cloaked in invisibility; he captures a fragment of the world without identifying himself with his immediate environment. Perhaps he thinks he achieves identification - but only the spectator of his photograph can be sure. He seems to avoid detection; no one in his pictures seems to recognize him or acknowledge his presence. It is a peephole - or keyhole - view point: the sly capturing of the private moment, the time-slice of turmoil, the "observation" of the little man who wasn't there!
"I remember a photographic educator who violently condemned any picture in which the subject "mugged" the camera. His concept of a picture was suspiciously reminiscent of an aquarium thronged with weary, uninterested fish, or a stage of posturing puppets. 1 fortified myself by recalling Strand's wonderful Mexican photographs; in many of these the subjects are looking at you - you are there with them, you may almost speak to them. Because of this intimacy, reality is magically intensified, another dimension of response is added to the dimensions of statement. Do I hear the word "empathy"?
"Many of the people shown in Riis's work looked at the camera and the photographer at the moment of exposure. They did not realize that they were looking at you and me and all humanity for ages of time. Their postures and groupings are not contrived; the moment of exposure was selected more for the intention of truth than for the intention of effect.
"It would be difficult to imagine these photographs as single images apart from the great matrix of Riis's project. Riis's photographs, books, articles and lectures exist as a unit statement, a consuming lifework. This is what photography should be - an integrated creative and constructive statement, not a series of disconnected and unorganized images of more or less superficial appeal. The photographer when "expressing himself" or reflecting an ideological or purely aesthetic line is, in effect, shadowboxing with reality. The larger aspects of reality humanity, nature in implied or direct relation to humanity - cannot be compressed into stylized, intellectual patterns. Statements which are built upon and express truthful intention will seldom be ineffective. The mechanics of communication partake of truth when truth is the objective. The techniques of the pictorialist and the esoteric abstractionist often reflect the weakness of their concept and expression. In Riis's work I am never conscious of technique, methods or means - only of appropriate and efficient mechanical necessities. As revealed in the Alland prints, the quality of his flash illumination is extraordinary; the plastic shadow-edges, modulations and textures of flesh, the balance of interior flash and exterior daylight - what contemporary work really exceeds it in competence and integrity?"
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