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==Early life==
==Early life==


Jacob Riis was the third of 15 children born to Niels Riis, schoolteacher and editor of the local [[Ribe]] newspaper, and Carolina Riis, a homemaker.<ref name="bernstein">{{cite journal |journal=Photographica World: The Journal of the Photographic Collectors Club in Great Britain|url=http://www.lenbernstein.com/RiisArticle.html |title=What Do The World and People Deserve? |issue=98|date=April 2001|last=Bernstein|first=Len}}</ref> Riis was influenced both by his stern father, whose school Riis took delight in disrupting, and by the authors he read, among whom [[Charles Dickens]] and [[James Fenimore Cooper]] were his favorites. When Riis was 11, his younger brother drowned. Riis would be haunted for the rest of his life by the images of his drowning brother and of his mother staring at his brother's empty chair at the dinner table.<ref name="bernstein" /> At 12, Riis amazed all who knew him when he donated all the money he received for Christmas to a poor Ribe family, at a time when money was scarce for anyone.{{fact}} When Riis was 16, he fell in love with Elisabeth Gortz, the daughter of a richer family who disapproved of him as a prospective husband and who dissuaded her from accepting his proposal to marry; to his dismay, Riis was forced to seek work in [[Copenhagen]] as a [[carpenter]] without her.<ref name="bernstein" />
Jacob Riis was the third of 15 children born to Niels Riis, schoolteacher and editor of the local [[Ribe]] newspaper, and Carolina Riis, a homemaker.<ref name="bernstein">{{cite journal |journal=Photographica World: The Journal of the Photographic Collectors Club in Great Britain|url=http://www.lenbernstein.com/RiisArticle.html |title=What Do The World and People Deserve? |issue=98|date=April 2001|last=Bernstein|first=Len}}</ref> Riis was influenced both by his stern father, whose school Riis took delight in disrupting, and by the authors he read, among whom [[Charles Dickens]] and [[James Fenimore Cooper]] were his favorites. When Riis was 11, his younger brother drowned. Riis would be haunted for the rest of his life by the images of his drowning brother and of his mother staring at his brother's empty chair at the dinner table.<ref name="bernstein" /> At 12, Riis amazed all who knew him when he donated all the money he received for Christmas to a poor Ribe family, at a time when money was scarce for anyone.{{fact}} When Riis was 16, he fell in love with Elisabeth Gortz, the 12-year-old foster daughter of the owner of the company where he was doing work as an apprentice carpenter. The father disapproved of the boy's blundering attentions; and Riis was forced to complete his apprenticeship in carpentry in [[Copenhagen]].<ref>Janet B. Pascal, ''Jacob Riis: Reporter and Reformer'' (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005; ISBN 0195145275), 14&ndash;15.</ref>


==Immigration to the United States==
==Immigration to the United States==

Revision as of 00:12, 10 August 2009

Jacob Riis
Jacob Riis in 1906
NationalityAmerican
Known forPhotography, Journalism

Jacob August Riis (May 3, 1849 - May 26, 1914), a Danish-American muckraker journalist, photographer, and social reformer, was born in Ribe, Denmark. He is known for his dedication to using his photographic and journalistic talents to help the less fortunate in New York City, which was the subject of most of his prolific writings and photographic essays. He helped with the implementation of "model tenements" in New York with the help of humanitarian Lawrence Veiller. As one of the first photographers to use flash, he is considered a pioneer in photography.[1]

Early life

Jacob Riis was the third of 15 children born to Niels Riis, schoolteacher and editor of the local Ribe newspaper, and Carolina Riis, a homemaker.[2] Riis was influenced both by his stern father, whose school Riis took delight in disrupting, and by the authors he read, among whom Charles Dickens and James Fenimore Cooper were his favorites. When Riis was 11, his younger brother drowned. Riis would be haunted for the rest of his life by the images of his drowning brother and of his mother staring at his brother's empty chair at the dinner table.[2] At 12, Riis amazed all who knew him when he donated all the money he received for Christmas to a poor Ribe family, at a time when money was scarce for anyone.[citation needed] When Riis was 16, he fell in love with Elisabeth Gortz, the 12-year-old foster daughter of the owner of the company where he was doing work as an apprentice carpenter. The father disapproved of the boy's blundering attentions; and Riis was forced to complete his apprenticeship in carpentry in Copenhagen.[3]

Immigration to the United States

Riis went to the United States by steamer in 1870, when he was 21, seeking employment as a carpenter. He arrived during an era of social turmoil. Large groups of migrants and immigrants flooded urban areas in the years following the Civil War seeking prosperity in a more industrialized environment. Twenty-four million people moved to urban centers, causing the population to increase eightfold.[1] In the 1880s 334,000 people were crammed into a single square mile of the Lower East Side, making it the most densely populated place on earth. They were packed into filthy, disease ridden tenements, 10 or 15 to a room in ghettoes sequestered from the well-to-do, whose opinions were primarily based upon spectacular articles and books like James D. McCabe's New York by Sun-light and Gas-light (1882).[4]

The demographics of American urban centers grew significantly more heterogeneous as immigrant groups arrived in waves, creating ethnic enclaves often more populous than even the largest cities in the homelands.[1] Riis found himself just another poor immigrant in New York. His only companion was a stray dog he met shortly after his arrival. The dog brought him inspiration and when a police officer mercilessly beat it to death, Riis was devastated. One of his personal victories, he later confessed, was not using his eventual fame to ruin the career of the offending officer.[2] Riis spent most of his nights in police-run poorhouses, whose conditions were so ghastly that Riis dedicated himself to having them shut down.[5]

Journalism career

Riis walks the beat in New York City behind his friend and fellow reformer, NYC Police Commissioner, Theodore Roosevelt 1894 - Illustration from Riis' autobiography
Bandit's Roost by Jacob Riis, 1888, from How the Other Half Lives. This image is Bandit's Roost at 59½ Mulberry Street, considered the most crime-ridden, dangerous part of New York City.

Riis held various jobs before he accepted a position as a police reporter in 1873 with the New York Evening Sun newspaper. In 1874, he joined the news bureau of the Brooklyn News. In 1877 he served as police reporter, this time for the New York Tribune. During these stints as a police reporter, Riis worked the most crime-ridden and impoverished slums of the city. Through his own experiences in the poor houses, and witnessing the conditions of the poor in the city slums, he decided to make a difference for those who had no voice.[1] Working the night-shift duty in the immigrant communities of Manhattan's Lower East Side, Riis developed a tersely melodramatic writing style; his pieces gave him credibility in the nascent field of urban reform.

Riis and Photography

Riis's connections to the sanitation and health programs, both public and private, introduced him to a group of reformers, one of whom was an avid amateur photographer. It was this man, Dr. Nagle, and his colleague Dr. Henry G. Piffard, who introduced Riis to photography and for a time served as photographers for his early muckraking projects. As their ardor cooled, Riis found it necessary to teach himself photography, and for some three years he combined his own photographs with others commissioned of professionals, donations by amateurs, and purchased "lantern slides," all of which formed the basis for his photographic archive. Because so much of the work was done at night, Riis and his photographers were among the first Americans to use flash powder, allowing documentation of New York City slums to penetrate the dark streets, tenement apartments, and "stale-beer" dives, and helping him capture the hardships faced by the poor and criminal along his police beats, especially on the notorious Mulberry Street.

This work was instrumental in convincing then-president of the Board of Commissioners of the New York City Police Department, Theodore Roosevelt, to close the police-run poor houses in which Riis suffered during his first months as an American. After reading Riis's exposees, Roosevelt was so deeply moved by his sense of justice that he met him and befriended him for life, calling him "the best American I ever knew."[5] In 1906 Roosevelt himself coined the term "muckraking journalism", of which Riis was a recognized exponent.[2]

Marriages and later life

At age 25, Riis wrote to Elisabeth Gortz to propose a second time. This time Gortz accepted, and joined Riis in New York City, saying "We will strive together for all that is noble and good".[citation needed] Indeed, Gortz supported Riis in his work, and he spent the next 25 years using his artistic medium to advance the concerns of the poor. During this time, Riis wrote another 12 works, including his autobiography The Making of an American in 1901.[5] His daughter, Clara C. Riis, married Dr. William Clarence Fiske.[6] His son, Edward V. Riis, represented American media[vague] in Denmark after World War I.[7] In 1905, his wife grew ill and died. In 1907, Riis remarried, and with his new wife, Mary Phillips, moved to a farm in Barre, Massachusetts. Riis died on May 26, 1914, at his Massachusetts farm. His second wife would live until 1967, continuing work on the farm, working on Wall Street and teaching classes at Columbia University.[8]

Criticism

Critics have noted that, despite Riis' sense of populist justice, he belittled women and people of certain ethnic and racial groups.[1][9] In his autobiography, The Making of an American, Riis decided to allow his wife to add a chapter examining her own life. After letting her begin an honest and evocative biographical sketch over several pages titled "Elizabeth Tells Her Story",[10] Riis decided his wife had had enough of the stage: "I cut the rest of it off, because I am the editor and want to begin again here myself, and what is the use of being an editor unless you can cut 'copy?' Also, it is not good for woman to allow her to say too much."[11]

Furthermore, Riis' writings, particularly in How the Other Half Lives, revealed his prejudices against many ethnic groups, cataloguing stereotypes of those with whom he had less in common.

Writings

Memorials

References

  1. ^ a b c d e James Davidson and Mark Lytle, “The Mirror with a Memory,” After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection (New York: McGraw Hill, 2000).
  2. ^ a b c d Bernstein, Len (April 2001). "What Do The World and People Deserve?". Photographica World: The Journal of the Photographic Collectors Club in Great Britain (98).
  3. ^ Janet B. Pascal, Jacob Riis: Reporter and Reformer (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005; ISBN 0195145275), 14–15.
  4. ^ James D. McCabe, New York by Sun-Light and Gas-Light. Philadelphia: Douglass Brothers, 1882.
  5. ^ a b c Teaching History Online: "Jacob Riis".
  6. ^ New York Times June 2, 1900 [dubious – discuss]
  7. ^ New York Times September 21, 1918.[dubious – discuss]
  8. ^ Francesca Pitaro, "Guide to the Jacob Riis Papers" (Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library, 1985; available online as a PDF file here).
  9. ^ Maren Stange, Symbols of Ideal Life: Social Documentary Photography in America, 1890-1915 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 2–46.
  10. ^ "Elizabeth Tells Her Story", The Making of an American (New York: Macmillan, 1901).
  11. ^ Jacob A. Riis, The Making of an American (London: Macmillan, 1970), 283.
  12. ^ P.S. 126 The Jacob Riis Community School
  13. ^ Preservation Chicago
  14. ^ Welcome to Jacob A. Riis Neighborhood Settlement House at www.riissettlement.org

Sources

  • Alland, Alexander, Jacob Riis, Photographer and Citizen.Millerton, NY: Aperture Press, 1974.
  • Hales, Peter, Silver Cities: Photographing American Urbanization, 1839-1939. Albuquequem, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2005.
  • Stange, Maren, Symbols of Ideal Life: Social Documentary Photography in America, 1890-1915. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
  • Yockelson, Bonnie and Czitrom, Daniel, Rediscovering Jacob Riis, Exposure Journalism and Photography in Turn-of-the-Century New York. New York: The New Press, 2006.
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