Biography of jacob riis

A pioneer in the use of photography as an agent of social reform, Jacob Riis immigrated to the United States in 1870. While working as a police reporter for the New York Tribune, he did a series of exposés on slum conditions in a series of tenement photographs on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, which led him to view photography as a way of communicating the need for slum reform to the public. He made photographs of these areas and published articles and gave lectures that had significant results, including the establishment of the Tenement House Commission in 1884. In 1888, Riis left the Tribune to work for the Evening Sun, where he began making the photographs that would be reproduced as engravings and halftones in How the Other Half Lives, his celebrated work documenting the living conditions of the poor, which was published to widespread acclaim in 1890. Continuing to focus on photography about poverty during the last twenty-five years of his life, Riis produced other books on

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Summary of Jacob Riis

Riis was one of America's first photojournalists. As a newspaper reporter, photographer, and social reformer, he rattled the conscience of Americans with his descriptions - pictorial and written - of New York's slum conditions. As an early pioneer of flashlamp photography, he was able to capture the squalid lives of immigrant families living on the very edges of society. His lectures and, subsequent books, including the famous How the Other Half Lives (1890), was so influential that they brought about new legislation to improve tenement housing conditions and general standards of sanitation across America. Riis's work is hailed now as the precursor to so-called "muckraking journalism" that became a fixture in American newspaper publications after 1900. His most glowing endorsement came from (the future US President) Theodore Roosevelt who referred to him as "the best American I ever knew [sic]" with "the great gift of making others see what he saw and feel w

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Jacob Riis

(1849-1914)

Who Was Jacob Riis?

Jacob Riis immigrated to the United States in 1870. After a series of odd jobs, he became a police reporter, a job he enhanced with his natural photographic skills. Led bygd his interest in New York City's tenement life and the harsh conditions people living there endured, he used his camera as a tool to bring about change. With his 1890 book How the Other Half Lives, Riis put those living conditions on display in a package that wasn't to be ignored, and his career as a social reformer was launched.

Early Years

Jacob August Riis was born on May 3, 1849, in Ribe, Denmark, and immigrated to the United States in 1870 on a steamship. All he carried with him was $40 and a locket containing a hair from a girl he loved. Upon his ankomst in New York City, Riis struggled his way through various jobs — ironworker, farmer, bricklayer, salesman — all jobs that gave him an up-close look at the less prosperous side of the American urban environm