Customer Reviews

Rediscovering Jacob Riis: Exposure Journalism and Photography in Turn-of-the-Century New York

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This book really has something for everyone, whether you're new to learning about Riis' reform work or a historian familiar with the subject. It's made up of two well-written, clear essays: the first focuses on Riis in a historical perspective, full of details about the late nineteenth-century city, while the second looks at Riis' images and the ways they were altered, manipulated and re-drawn in popular publications. If you're just an interested reader, there's plenty here to engage you-- the politics of urban reform, the discussions of the images (the reproductions are excellent), the variety offered by having two essays rather than a single author. As a historian, though, I think there's a wider and really fascinating argument being made here. Traditionally, Riis has been placed at the beginning of a reform tradition that then moves through Lewis Hine up to the FSA and onward; historians have accepted that, but struggled with Riis' sentimentality, his 'faking' of his images, the shared authorship of the photos etc. as compared with Hine and later photographers. The authors here argue that the chronology is in fact mistaken, and place Hine at the beginning of the social documentary movement. They argue that Riis is best understood as one of the last of the urban-voyeur movement, and that How the Other Half Lives belong in the 19th-century tradition of the "sunshine-and-shadow" guidebooks. Their evidence is based not just in the pictures and text, but in how Riis used the images in his lectures, and in his own disinterest in the images as part of his legacy; it's a very convincing argument, clearly made, and I think it makes a lot of sense out of Riis and offers a satisfying re-imagining of the trajectory of reform photography. Historians haven't really engaged with this book yet, though-- I'm still seeing a lot on Riis and Hine placed together-- but it deserves more attention from Gilded Age/20th-centuryists. If you're a general reader, don't let that put you off this book! But if you're a historian with an interest in the period, definitely check it out... interesting and original stuff, and a much-needed addition to the writing on Jacob Riis.

While I'm no expert on the subject, I'd guess this will become one of the definitive bios on Jacob Riis, and also contains many of his important photos as a bonus. The reproduction quality is good enough -- probably better than the original print publications -- but not exceptional.

This is a photographer that I personally had never heard of before I read the book review. This book gave me a realistic view of how my great-grandmother and her mother, lived when the arrived in New York in 1896. I enjoyed it, it captures the weariness of the times