Essay about Jacob Riis

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Jacob Riis: The renowned Muckraker

Jacob Riis was a journalist and social documentary photographer. He is known for using his photographic and journalistic talents to help the impoverished in New York City; those impoverished New Yorkers were the subject of most of his prolific writings and photography. As one of the most famous proponents of the newly practicable casual photography, he is considered one of the fathers of photography due to his very early adoption of flash in photography. While living in New York, Riis experienced poverty and became a police reporter writing about the quality of life in the slums. He attempted to alleviate the bad living conditions of poor people by exposing their living conditions to the middle and upper classes. Jacob was born in Ribe, Denmark. Jacob Riis was the third of the 15 children. Among them, only Jacob, one sister and the foster sister survived into the twentieth century. Riis was influenced by his father, whose school Riis delighted in disrupting, and who persuaded him to read Charles Dickens's magazine All the Year Round and the novels of James Cooper. Riis immigrated to America in 1870, when he was 21 years old, seeking employment as a carpenter. Riis worked the most crime-ridden and impoverished slums of the city. Through his own experiences in the poorhouses, and witnessing the conditions of the poor in the city slums, he decided to make a difference for them. Working night-shift duty in the immigrant communities of Manhattan's Lower East Side, Riis developed a tersely melodramatic writing style and he became one of the earliest reformist journalists. He had for some time been wondering how to show the squalor of which he wrote more vividly than his words could express. Camera lenses of the 1880s were slow—necessarily, for depth of field despite their considerable focal lengths. Photography thus did not seem to be of any use for reporting about conditions of life in dark interiors. In early 1887, however, Riis was startled to read that "a way had been discovered [. . .] to take pictures by flashlight. The darkest corner might be photographed
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