Why is jacob riis famous

At the time, photographers were just beginning to use a flash to light their pictures. Early flash photography used explosives. It could be dangerous. Riis reportedly set two fires and almost blinded himself while using a flash. Still, flash was important for his work. Riis focused on photographing immigrants, street dwellers, and tenement buildings in New York City.

Here, he captures a musician as his wife holds a tin cup for donations. Immigrants from Europe and Asia came to the U. Most were escaping war and famine. These immigrants gathered in poor neighborhoods like the Lower East Side of Manhattan. There, they lived in run-down apartment houses called tenements. Many lacked indoor plumbing. Often, rooms facing the street were the only ones to get light and air. These conditions helped spread diseases like typhus. In , Riis published his first book.

Moreover, he spent significant time homeless and penniless, surviving on charitable donations of food from religious figures and cooks. At one point, Riis became so desperate that he considering ending his life. However, thanks to a stray dog, Riis persisted Pascal, His investigations led him to some stunning discoveries, including the horrible living conditions of New York tenements.

He found that some tenement conditions were so abysmal that the infant death rate was 1 in This was verified by the fact that when he eventually moved to a farm in Massachusetts, many of his original photographic negatives and slides — over in total — were left in a box in the attic in his old house in Richmond Hill. It became a best seller, garnering wide awareness and acclaim. He went on to write more than a dozen books, including Children of the Poor, which focused on the particular hard-hitting issue of child homelessness.

Riis recounted his own remarkable life story in The Making of An American , his second national best-seller. It told his tale as a poor and homeless immigrant from Denmark; the love story with his wife; the hard-working reporter making a name for himself and making a difference; to becoming well-known, respected and a close friend of the President of the United States.

Today, this is still a timeless story of becoming an American. The success of his first book and new found social status launched him into a career of social reform. Riis became sought after and travelled extensively, giving eye-opening presentations right across the United States. He was determined to educate middle-class Americans about the daily horrors that poor city residents endured.

More than just writing about it, Jacob A. Riis actively sought to make changes happen locally, advocating for efforts to build new parks, playgrounds and settlement houses for poor residents. Many of these were successful. His most enduring legacy remains the written descriptions, photographs, and analysis of the conditions in which the majority of New Yorkers lived in the late nineteenth century.

Learn More. Biography A pioneer in the use of photography as an agent of social reform, Jacob Riis immigrated to the United States in 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 In , 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 During the last twenty-five years of his life, Riis produced other books on similar topics, along with many writings and lantern slide lectures on themes relating to the improvement of social conditions for the lower classes.

Despite their success during his lifetime, however, his photographs were largely forgotten after his death; ultimately his negatives were found and brought to the attention of the Museum of the City of New York, where a retrospective exhibition of his work was held in Riis was among the first in the United States to conceive of photographic images as instruments for social change; he was also among the first to use flash powder to photograph interior views, and his book How the Other Half Lives was one of the earliest to employ halftone reproduction successfully.