Jacob Riis Photo-journalist

Jacob Riis, the third of fifteen children, was born in Ribe, Denmark, on 3rd May, His father was a schoolteacher and his mother was a homemaker.

Jacob’s father persuaded him to read (and improve his English via) Charles Dickens's magazine “All the Year Around” and the novels James Fenimore Cooper. Jacob had a happy childhood, but experienced tragedy at the age of eleven when his ten year-old brother Theodor drowned. He never forgot his mother's grief.

At age eleven or twelve, he donated all the money he had to a poor Ribe family living in a squalid house, but on condition that they cleaned it. The tenants took the money and obliged; when he told his mother, she went to help.

Although his father hoped Jacob would have a literary career, Jacob wanted to be a carpenter. He learned carpentry skills as an apprentice in Ribe and then in Copenhagen. He returned to Ribe when he was 19, but in 1870, when he couldn’t find work in the region as a carpenter, Jacob Riis emigrated to the United States. He was 21 years old. He paid the $50 for his passage on the steamer and, in his pocket, he had $40 that friends had given him.

During his first couple of years in the U.S., Riis worked at a variety of jobs– in New York as well as other states including Pennsylvania and Illinois. Besides carpentry, he tried working on a farm, in a mine, even selling flatirons. Life wasn’t easy for him. He was often destitute, at one time sleeping on a tombstone and surviving on windfall apples. At other times, he lived on scavenged food and handouts from restaurants. He often slept in public areas or in a foul-smelling police lodging-house in an area of New York City called Five Points.

His break came when a teacher he’d met earlier told him about a job opening at a newspaper office. After an interview, he was offered a job and was able to write about not only the rich of New York City (as he was first asked to do), but also the life of poor immigrants who lived in the Five Points neighborhoods where Riis himself had spent time.

Five Points, an area of marshy land on the southern end of Manhattan, became a magnet for immigrants first arriving in New York City, and almost any nationality, ethnicity, or color of human could be found. “In the 1880’s, 334,000 people were crammed into a single square mile, making it the most densely populated place on earth. They were packed into filthy, disease-ridden tenements… and the well-off knew nothing about them and cared less."

Five Points was not anyone’s first choice of a place to live, but new arrivals had few assets. Criminal gangs roamed the streets, and the squalor was almost unimaginable – diseases such as typhoid, cholera, and even yellow fever took hold occasionally and burned through the area.

Tenements, meant to house perhaps a few score people, held hundreds. Many single rooms had as many as twelve people or more living in a 100 square foot space. Entire families might live, breed, and die in such horrific surroundings, sleeping, cooking and trying to survive in one cramped space.

In 1877, after several years working for other papers and even owning a small paper for a while, Riis became a police reporter for the New York Tribune.

Aware of what it was like to live in poverty, Riis was determined to use this opportunity to employ his journalistic skills to communicate this to the public. He constantly argued that the "poor were the victims rather than the makers of their fate".

Over the years Riis wrote many articles and several books as well as gave lectures on the problems of the poor. His lectures included “magic lantern” shows (essentially the first slide shows, projected on a hanging sheet), and one observer noted that "his viewers moaned, shuddered, fainted and even talked to the photographs he projected, reacting to the slides not as images but as a virtual reality that transported the New York slum world directly into the lecture hall."

In December, 1889, an account of city life, illustrated by photographs, appeared in Scribner’s Magazine. This created a great deal of interest and the following year, a full-length version, How the Other Half Lives, was published.

When Theodore Roosevelt was appointed president of the Board of Commissioners of the New York City Police Department in 1895, he asked Jacob Riis to show him the ropes. On his first night jaunt with Riis, Teddy found that 90% of his officers were missing from their assigned areas. Riis wrote about this disgrace in the next day’s paper, and for the rest of Roosevelt’s term, police were very visible as required. Roosevelt hailed Riis as a hero, and pushed for legislation aimed at improving living conditions in the slums.

Besides exposing the horrid living conditions in Five Points, Riis exposed the unsanitary condition of New York’s drinking water: “I took my camera and went up in the watershed photographing my evidence wherever I found it. Populous towns sewered directly into our drinking water. I went to the doctors and asked how many days a vigorous cholera bacillus may live and multiply in running water. About seven, said they. My case was made.” As a result of his investigative work the city bought up land in the watershed area; this move may have spared the city from a cholera epidemic.

Another one of the reforms Riis suggested was the creation of small parks and playgrounds, particularly in congested areas of the city, a movement that improved the quality of life for countless New Yorkers. In 1904, Riis wrote an article about the people of Denmark raising money to fight tuberculosis by selling special stamps at Christmastime. His article inspired a campaign to raise money for a children’s tuberculosis hospital in New York through the sale of one-cent Christmas stamps called Christmas seals.

Although Riis had some critics, his sincerity for social reform has seldom been questioned. His photographs allowed important change to take place for thousands of immigrants to this country.

A look at some of Riis’s photos Riis's photographs had a certain shock value. He looked for images that would have a strong effect on his viewers—dirty children on the streets, men living in dumps and cellars. By appealing to the consciences and fears of middle-class and upper-class city residents, Riis helped initiate reform efforts.

Jacob Riis, Homeless Children (1890)

Blind Beggar, 1890

Bandit’s Roost, 1888

Home of an Italian Ragpicker, 1888

In this photo, a tenement family makes cigars at the table.

In Sleeping Quarters – Rivington Street Dump 1892