Art/photography

Jacob Riis

As incredible as this might seem to some, the generation born in the 1980s has no knowledge of a dangerous New York City. Criminals, the crack epidemic and the streetscapes of starving children are largely foreign to them, rooted more in images of the developing world than in the everyday life of a young Manhattanite. Frustration on our blocks is hidden behind the juice bars, sushi joints and real estate brokers' fees.

Jacob Riis, who immigrated to New York City from Denmark in 1870 at the age of 21, may very well have had an experience akin to a young man arriving here today from a small town in Middle America. The third of 15 children, Riis began working as a carpenter. Later, as the struggles of a booming metropolis took hold, he became a police reporter. Eventually, he became known as a man whose Protestant faith impelled him to take up the cause of New York's slums. He would become famous for photographing the tenement dwellers and the conditions in which they lived. Today, he is remembered as one of the urban poor's greatest advocates, as well as something of a bigot: a man who believed in the racial science and ethnic categorization in vogue during his lifetime.

A new book, “Rediscovering Jacob Riis: Exposure Journalism and Photography in Turn-of-the-Century New York,” seeks to reframe Riis's legacy by asserting that it is better to understand his empathy for the immigrant slum than to dismiss him as just a dogmatist bent on civilizing the immigrant castes. For Daniel Czitrom and Bonnie Yochelson, the authors of the new book, a fresh look at his photography is a way to expand our view of Riis and, in turn, to understand the ways that equality for immigrants was attained at a time when race science was accepted as fact. “There is a disconnect between his photographs and his writing,” Czitrom said in an interview with the Forward. “His prejudices and ethnic stereotypes give way to his humanizing images.” To support this claim, the book contains a beautiful insert of photographs and illustrations from the Jacob A. Riis Collection at the Museum of the City of New York. Best known for his 1890 book “How the Other Half Lives,” Riis was also well known for traveling the country with picture slides, lecturing to Christian charity organizations about the conditions of the slum dwellers, most of whom were Italian, Jewish, Irish or African American. With his own evangelical leanings, and the New Testament alive in the countryside, Riis became a pioneer of photojournalism at a time when newspapers often didn't have the technology or funds to print photographs. According to Czitrom, a professor of history at Mount Holyoke College, As Riis tried to connect with an audience of turn-of-the-century, wealthy white Protestants, he was probably aware that playing on their prejudices in his words while pulling at their heartstrings with his images was a way to provide funds for the uplifting of the slums.

Riis's entrepreneurial and theatrical ...