American
photographer of Danish birth. The son of a school-teacher and editor, he was
well-educated when he came to the USA in 1870. He was a self-taught
photographer and worked at a variety of jobs before becoming a journalist, and
he understood the power of the written and illustrated word. Riis’s work in
journalism began in 1873 when he was employed by the New York News Association.
By 1874 he was editor and then owner of the South
Brooklyn News. In 1878 he won a coveted job as a police-reporter at the Tribune and found the basis of his life’s work
in his assigned territory, Mulberry Bend, where the worst slums and tenements
were (e.g. Mulberry Bend as It
Was, see Riis, 1901, p. 265).
Using flash photographs
to document articles and lectures, Riis emphasized the dehumanizing conditions
of New York’s slums with works such as Tenement
House Air-shaft and Gotham Court (see Riis, 1901, pp. 351, 355). He
photographed only from 1888 to 1898. The photographs, printed as half-tones or
used as a basis for engravings, illustrated his newspaper articles and books,
chiefly How the Other Half
Lives: Studies among the Tenements and The Battle with the Slum.
Satisfied that he had sufficient glass plates for illustrations, he gave up
photography.
The German
invention of magnesium flash was the catalyst in causing Riis to use
photography as a reporter’s tool. The flash made possible the camera’s
penetration into tenement interiors, and the grim determination and unfailing
vision with which Riis made these exposures is the great source of their
continuing vitality and their status as icons of the American reform era. He
was the first to realize the power of photographic documentation in the
campaign for social reform. The force of Riis’s gripping subject-matter and the
strength of his composition have drawn 20th-century photographers, such as
Ansel Adams and Rolf Petersen, to print from his glass plate negatives, which
are in the Museum of the City of New York.
Anne Ehrenkranz
From Grove Art Online
From Grove Art Online
© 2009 Oxford
University Press
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