Ws # 11 Jacob Riis Photos

Ws # 11 Jacob Riis Photos
1. Jacob Riis, Homeless
Children (1890)
http://www.nycarchitecture.com/LES/LES016.htm
2. Jacob Riis, Children sleeping in Mulberry Street (1890)
http://www.nyc-architecture.com/LES/USAriis1.jpg
3. Lodgers in a crowded Bayard Street Tenement; Five Cents
Lodging, , 1889
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/mse/photos/question3.html
In the modern era of digital imagery and motor driven cameras, it is easy to forget that
photographers like Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine operated with equipment that imposed
constraints on their actions and their ability to craft a candid scene. To gain access to the
alleyway in Bandit’s Roost, for example, Riis had to command his subjects to be still lest
stray motion ruin his photograph. Perhaps he negotiated with the alley dwellers himself;
more likely he relied on his companions to help set the scene while he unpacked and set
up his camera equipment. Riis’ famous after dark photographs required even more
planning and preparation. To capture the dim tenement interiors that so shocked his
audience, he employed a new flash powder, which resulted in the often startled
expressions of the people he photographed and the depiction of interiors with harsh lights
and shadows that may have exaggerated their actual appearance. Riis took the image
below in a crowded tenement room where single males paid Five Cents a Spot for a
night’s lodging. Riis entered this space with the help of the landlord, who received
assurances that he would not be prosecuted for running an illegal-lodging house. Riis
also needed the cooperation of the sleeping subjects, who had to appear to be awakened
by his flash. In order to create that appearance, Riis had to have them pose with their
faces toward the camera and then hold still while he ignited his flash powder and made
the exposure.
4. Cityscape,
1890
http://updateslive.blogspot.com/2010/01/lower-east-side-of-jacobriis.html
5.Young Boys Asleep in the Street
http://instructors.dwrl.utexas.edu/dean/node/97
6. Necktie work shop in Division Street
Tenement, 1889
1. New York City Slum, 1890’s
8. "Italian Mother and Baby, Ragpicker,
New York,
This is arguably Riis's most famous
image: it reeks of sentimentalism,
refers directly to the sort of Sundayschool chromolithographs one might
find at the time, and yet is chock-full
of emblematic details. As a translation
of a religious painting, it has often
been renamed the "Slum Madonna."
But the smaller details-- the dustpan
and broom at the lower left, and the
mountain of work on the stove to the
right, combined with Riis's own hat,
strategically placed to serve as a
surrogate halo, makes the picture
compelling nonetheless.
9.
Jacob Riis or associates, "Hunting River Thieves, New York," ca. 1890.
By contrast, this picture of police hunting "river rats"
or boat thieves, is typical of the ways he might open
his lectures-- though they were more like sermons,
and often given in the public lecture rooms of
Protestant churches. Here the audience was invited
to enter the dark mysteries of the city and see its
hidden "other half," accompanied by a trustworthy
and knowledgeable guide (Riis himself) and
protected by distance and the power of the camera
from actual confrontation.
10.
Jacob Riis, "Bandit's Roost," ca. 1890.
This startling view, however, represents the
increasingly confrontational relationship Riis
built up between his middle-class viewers and the subjects of view. While Riis was
undoubtedly racist and patronizing by contemporary standards, his overriding empathy
for the circumstances of his poverty-stricken subjects, and his belief that environment
made or at least contributed to criminal and antisocial behavior, pushed him toward
pictures like these. Here the viewer is confronted by a myriad of faces, blank, hostile,
threatening, in a dark alley. Surely it's no wonder that Victorians fainted, cried, called out
to the lantern-slide screen, or had to be led from the lecture hall: these pictures were,
after all, life size or larger in many cases, and this confrontational visual event was
unprecedented.
11.
Jacob Riis, "A Cave Dweller, One of 4
Pedlars Who Slept..." ca. 1890
Riis's reform argument targeted six major
areas: men, women, children, workplaces,
living and housingconditions, and
improvements, real and imagined. Here he
used the photograph to advance the linkage
between impossibly inhumane living
conditions, and the brutalization of the poor.
12.
Jacob Riis, "Minding Baby, Cherry Hill," ca. 1890
When Riis himself photographed, he was often formally inept but rhetorically brilliant.
Here the tilted frame and the abrupt cropping were probably the result of his singleminded attention to the children; nevertheless, the picture's strength remained a product
of its formal instability, even when the publishers "corrected" it, to some extent,in the
book illustration.
13. Jacob Riis, "A Growler Gang," ca. 1889.
Riis's images of children were divided into three broad categories-- innocents and
angels, like these; children threatened by their
environment and its inhumanities; and children
already corrupted into criminality by the failure of a
larger society to correct the influences upon them- as in this picture of "A Growler Gang," probably
wrongly titled, showing a group of young boys
seemingly rifling the pockets of a drunk:
14.
Jacob Riis, "The Bohemian Cigarmakers at
Home," ca. 1890-92.
Families forced to piecework in their own
homes were notorious violations of Victorian
ideals of home, family, and the separation of
spheres. In this case, Riis chose a
particularly compelling example, for the
making of cigars introduced the vice of
tobacco to children and even infants, in the
eyes of Riis and his Victorian audience.
15. Jacob Riis or associate, page from "The Battle with the Slum," 1902
Riis had more and more resources to draw from in illustrating the beneficial effect of
housing renewal, park and school building, and social services. Here, for example, he
shows poor immigrant children in organized healthful play, successfully entering the
mainstream of the American Dream
photos 8-15 http://www.uic.edu/depts/oee/fasi/riissequence.html
Google Images – Images # 1-7
http://www.google.com/images?client=safari&rls=en&q=Jacob+Ri
is+photos&oe=UTF-8&um=1&ie=UTF8&source=univ&ei=BF3XTPPnJcP38AbJ07HvBg&sa=X&oi=ima
ge_result_group&ct=title&resnum=1&ved=0CCcQsAQwAA&biw
=789&bih=788
16. A scrub woman in 1892,
http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographe
r/
17.
a home on Bleeker Street (at Mercer and Greene streets), a Jacob Riis
image
http://theboweryboys.blogspot.com/2008/09/original-imax-jacobriis-and-his-magic.html
18. Women’s lodging room in the West 47th Street Station
http://tsutpen.blogspot.com/2005/11/world-of-jacob-riis-5.html
19. New York Tenement, 1910
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ug02/barnes/citycountry.html
20. STREET ARABS IN SLEEPING
QUARTERS.
http://homepages.uwp.edu/takata/dearhabermas/jacobriis01.htm
21. Sweatshop in Ludlow Street tenement, New York City,
around 1889
http://americanhistory.si.edu/sweatshops/history/2t35.htm
22.
"Craps in the Hall of the Newboys's Lodging-House", How the Other Half Lives,
1901,
http://phomul.canalblog.com/archives/2009/05/01/1567728.html
23. Jacob Riis, “A class in the condemned Essex Market School,” c. 1890
http://images.zeno.org/Fotografien/I/big/PHO03551.jpg
24.
1900: Girls on stoop
http://www.streetplay.com/cityplay/03-2000/pg02.shtml
By the early nineteenth century,
New Yorkers
had already developed an
affinity for
"stoop sitting" on warm summer
evenings. In
the 1820s, one Englishman
raved about
the joys of sitting outdoors "on
the steps that
ornament the entrances of the
houses. On
these occasions, friends
assemble in
the most agreeable and
unceremonious manner. All
sorts of
cooling beverages and excellent
confectionary
are handed round and the
greatest good
humour and gaiety prevail."
Although one
architectural critic had accused the stoop of "endangering the neck," for the Englishman, stoopsitting was so pleasing that it compensated for the burden of climbing the steps.
25. http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/3233992/Hulton-Archive
Dutch-born photographer and social reformer Jacob Riis (1849 - 1914) snaps a
photograph in front of a vegetable stand and the post office on 55 1/2 to 57 Mulberry
Street, Little Italy, New York City (Photo by Jacob A. Riis/Museum of the City of New
York/Getty Images)
1890
26. A baby’s playground- children of the poor
http://drewphotoalastair.blogspot.com/2009/12/jacob-riis.html
27
http://drewphotoalastair.blogspot.com/2009/12/jacobriis.html
Those of Mullins alley (outside the tenements)- How the Other Half Lives [1]
28. Jacob Riis’ Chinatown
http://instructors.dwrl.utexas.edu/dean/node/97