Jacob A. Riis
1849 - 1914
A Danish-born police reporter with a knack of publicity and an abiding Christian faith, Jacob
Riis won international recognition for his 1890 bestseller, “How the Other Half Lives,” which
exposed the desperate and squalid conditions of New York City’s tenement slums and gave
momentum to a sanitary reform movement that started in the 1840s and culminated in New
York State’s landmark Tenement House Act of 1901.
Born in the rural town of Ribe in northern Denmark, Riis immigrated to New York in 1870 and
spent five years as an itinerant worker. He turned to journalism in 1873 and was hired in 1877 as
a police reporter at The New York Tribune, where he worked until 1890. He began taking
photographs in 1888, after the invention of magnesium flash powder in Germany allowed
photographic images to be captured in little light. He first began presenting his photographs as
lantern slides as part illustrated lectures that were presented as entertainment. Although he
viewed his photography as ancillary to his writing, today he is recognized as a important
predecessor to social documentarians like Lewis Hine and Dorothea Lange.
Following the critical success of “How the Other Half Lives,” Riis wrote a follow-up volume,
“Children of the Poor” (1892), and a best-selling autobiography, “The Making of an American”
(1901), among other books. His work was cited as an inspiration for future officials like Fiorello
H. La Guardia and Frances Perkins.
As Bonnie Yochelson and Daniel Czitrom argued in “Rediscovering Jacob Riis: Exposure
Journalism and Photography in Turn-of-the-Century New York” (New Press, 2008), the
contradictory elements of Riis’s life and work have largely been forgotten. He was an
entertainer, a self-promoter, an evangelical, and a political conservative who had little faith in
the power of government to correct social ills, arguing instead for Christian charity. He held
views on race and ethnicity that would be considered offensive today but were consistent with
the social Darwinist theories that were in vogue in the late 19th century.