Knowra Jacob Riis Jacob Riis Jacob Riis was a Danish-American journalist, photographer, and social reformer whose writing and photographs documented poverty and overcrowded tenement life in New York City.
How the Other Half Lives : Jacob Riis’s 1890 book documenting poverty and overcrowded housing in New York City. This book brought his tenement reporting to a broad audience and became his defining work.
Flash photography : Photography made with a brief burst of artificial light, allowing images in dark settings. Flash let Riis photograph interiors and alleys that available light could not reveal.
Theodore Roosevelt : An American politician who served as New York City police commissioner, governor, and the 26th U.S. president. As police commissioner, Roosevelt worked with Riis and later credited him as an influence.
Tenement House Act of 1901 : A New York State law establishing stronger standards for light, ventilation, sanitation, and safety in tenement housing. The law followed decades of housing agitation to which Riis’s reporting contributed.
Bandit's Roost : A photograph by Jacob Riis depicting a crowded alley in Manhattan’s Mulberry Bend. The image became one of his most recognizable records of life in a New York tenement district.
Documentary photography : Photography intended to record people, places, or events as evidence or social documentation. Riis’s images helped establish photography as a tool for exposing social conditions.
Charles A. Dana : An American journalist and newspaper editor who led the New York Sun for many years. Dana hired Riis at the Sun, giving him a major platform for reporting on New York.
New York City Tenement House Department : A municipal agency created in 1902 to enforce New York City tenement housing regulations. Its creation institutionalized oversight of the housing problems Riis exposed.
Mulberry Bend : A densely populated Lower Manhattan neighborhood associated with overcrowded housing and poverty in the late nineteenth century. Riis used the district as a vivid setting for his accounts of tenement life.
Muckraker : A journalist who investigates and publicizes corruption or social abuses, especially in the early twentieth century. Riis’s investigative reporting anticipated the reform journalism later associated with muckraking.
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