Jacob Riis How The Other Half Lives Summary

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Jacob Riis’s work How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York documents the filthy living conditions of NYC in the 1880s. He bought a detective camera and went around taking pictures of real life NYC tenements. He describes how he believes the tenement system failed because of neglect and greed from the wealthy. Throughout his book he shares photos of different ethnic groups in the slums and uses slurs and stereotypes but keeps his theory that the reason for poverty is the conditions that surround it. At the end he talks about how to fix this problem. Photography is one way because it was a way to prove and show the conditions that people were living in and this increased sympathy for these communities. Riis was able
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