A Justice Site
Jacob Riis, STREET ARABS IN SLEEPING QUARTERS. Taken from Bartleby.com
RESOURCES: Community-Building - Visual Sociology - Message-Building
POST on YAHOO GROUP: Dear Habermas Discussion Group - Write Free
SEARCH: - Site Index - Topics Index - FAQS on Navigating Site
FACULTY ASSISTANCE: Letters of Recommendation - Susan - jeanne
UWP Criminal Justice Dept. - CSUDH Dept. of Sociology
| Merriam-Webster Dictionary Search: |
California State University, Dominguez Hills Backup of Editorial Observer: Recovering the Complex Legacy of the Photographer Jacob Riis February 12, 2008 Highlights and commentary by jeanne.
If you have seen any of Jacob Riis’s photographs, you have probably never forgotten them. Riis was the Danish-born police reporter who in the late 1880s brought magnesium-flash photography into some of the darkest and most troubled spots in New York City — the tenements near Mulberry Bend, where Columbus Park now stands. New immigrants were crushed together there in some of the worst squalor and highest population densities ever recorded on this planet.
By Riis’s time, social and political reform efforts had been going on for half a century, but to little effect. What made the difference was his photographs, which Riis used in popular lectures and in his best-selling book, “How the Other Half Lives,” published in 1890, five years before the Mulberry Bend tenements were finally torn down.
His photographs showed a hidden city, a morgue of the living. He allowed New Yorkers to witness, as if firsthand, the overcrowding he caught in the cellars and flophouses, the tenement rooms where sleeping bodies were stacked on top of each other, the dingy corners that had been turned into sweatshops.
His pictures are a harsh, unofficial census, a record of impossible conditions in immigrant New York. On each face he photographed, there is a look of personal extinction except, that is, on the faces of children, who somehow manage to look only hardened.
The starkness of Riis’s photographs never fades. The memory of how Riis actually used his photographs, especially in his lectures, has faded. We expect the harshness of the camera’s eye, its unblinking testimony. But according to two students of Riis’s work, Bonnie Yochelson and Daniel Czitrom, Riis’s lectures — which were a critical part of his reforming mission — owed as much to vaudeville as they did to journalism.
Along with his lantern slides, Riis told dialect jokes and ethnic humor. He told stories and scheduled pauses for sacred singing. Near the end of the talk, he showed slides of the burial trench at Potter’s Field and Jesus Christ.
Strange as his lectures would have seemed to us, this mixture of spirituality and rough humor may actually have increased the effectiveness of his images for audiences of the time. Riis made the invisible visible, but he also made the audience feel its responsibility to act, to take a part in the reform movement that would eventually sweep away the tenements.
What would it have been like to see the photograph called “I Scrubs” — Riis’s portrait of 9-year-old Katie, who kept house for her brothers and sisters — and know that she was living somewhere in the city, her life shrunken to little more than a sense of economic duty?
There is nothing that we in the 21st century can do for Katie except to wonder whether she was ever allowed to outgrow her premature elderliness. But to Riis’s audience, Katie was the living present, the very burden of their concern. What was she like? How did she sound? What could it mean to be 9 years old and so ancient already? These are questions it would have seemed natural to ask the photographer who had asked Katie to pose for him.
To us, of course, Riis’s showmanship would have seemed like intolerable distractions from the purity of the suffering his images convey. The last thing these photographs need, from the modern point of view, is an interlocutor, especially one who wants to tell moralizing anecdotes or characterize his subjects by race.
From the distance of 120 years, the mute testimony of Riis’s photographs seems eloquent enough. We stare at them and know that though times may have changed in Mulberry Bend, the camera does not have far to look to find suffering that is every bit as dire.
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
Consider photography.
References:
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Created: February 8, 2008
Latest Update: February 8, 2008
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu
patriciaacone@yahoo.com
Yahoo Discussion Group: Building Communities
By Verlyn Klinkeborg
SOURCE: New York Times
Copyright: Source Copyright.
Included here under Fair Use Doctrine for teaching purposes only and for archival preservation when old papers are dropped from existing websites or when websites and/or their archives cease to exist.
This backup copy is to be used only if the original site on the Web is not accessible. It is meant to preserve the document for teaching purposes, when sometimes the URLS are changed when sites are updated, or sites are eliminated. Please be certain to give credit if you refer to this material to the original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/12/opinion/12tue4.html. Original URL, consulted: February 12, 2008.
Editorial Observer
Recovering the Complex Legacy of the Photographer Jacob Riis
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Katie is living present for us, too. The purity of suffering in poverty has never gone away. jeanne.
"[I]ntolerable distraction," maybe, for an editor of the New York Times. But maybe not for a middle school child or a distracted college student, or an older adult caught up in the fast track of everyday life. We tend to grow tired of the same old thing all the time. Try being different. jeanne
