How the Other Half Lives: A Classic Study of Poverty, Tenement Life, and Reform in New York City - Hardcover

Riis, Jacob A.: - Jacob A. Riis was a Danish-born American journalist, photographer, lecturer, and social reformer whose work helped define modern documentary journalism. Born in Ribe, Denmark, in 1849, Riis emigrated to the United States as a young man and experienced poverty and insecurity before establishing himself as a newspaper reporter in New York City. His reporting on police work, tenement life, immigration, child poverty, and urban overcrowding gave him direct access to the conditions he later documented in How the Other Half Lives. The Library of Congress notes Riis's role in the history of tenement reform and his attention to the long struggle over conditions in neighborhoods such as Five Points and Mulberry Bend.Riis became one of the best-known reform journalists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, using both words and images to make poverty visible to readers who might otherwise have ignored it. His work helped establish documentary photography as a tool of social witness, even as his writing also preserves many of the prejudices and reform assumptions of his time. How the Other Half Lives, first published in 1890, remains his central work: a major text in American social history, urban reform, immigration history, photojournalism, and the literature of poverty in the modern city.