In late nineteenth-century New York, two irreconcilable rhythms pulsed side by side.
On Fifth Avenue, the elite toasted a prosperity fueled by the Second Industrial Revolution. Just a short walk away, in the Lower East Side, thousands of immigrants shared filthy mattresses, breathed air thick with coal smoke and clung to dreams sold by factories that paid by the piece.
That economic abyss inspired a vocabulary of metaphors, but no one had yet translated it into images until a Danish reporter named Jacob A. Riis decided to strike a magnesium flash in the shadows of the tenements. His book How the Other Half Lives, published in 1890, marked a turning point in the history of photography by proving that the camera could operate both as a social scalpel and as a political battering ram.
Riis was born in 1849 in Ribe, Denmark, a small town of cobblestone streets where he learned that poverty was more bearable when shared, but unbearable when marginalized. He emigrated to the United States in 1870 with a few coins, a carpenter’s trade and the conviction that the promised land was accessible to anyone willing to work. Reality hit hard at Castle Garden’s docks: hunger, unemployment and con artists selling nonexistent jobs. For years, he begged for a place to sleep in rundown boarding houses until he found work as a police reporter for the New York Tribune. That job opened doors to police stations and alleyways where he saw that crime did not stem from innate evil but from daily misery. Writing alone, he realized, was not enough to shake consciences; the raw evidence had to be shown.
In 1887, technology offered the perfect ally: the magnesium flash. That spark allowed him to light up windowless rooms and interior courtyards where sunlight never reached. Riis began roaming neighborhoods like Mulberry Bend, Bandits’ Roost and Hell’s Kitchen, accompanied by officers who kept angry tenants at bay as the sudden flash burst into the darkness. In those spaces, he captured children sleeping on planks, seamstresses bent over for fourteen hours a day, alcoholics sharing scraps of stale bread and rats roaming freely. Each glass plate meant risk, sweat and the certainty that truth does not ask permission.
The visual material combined with statistics on child mortality, court transcripts and vivid descriptions. The result was a volume unlike anything seen in the illustrated press. How the Other Half Lives abandoned the picturesque tone of curiosity journalism and adopted the urgency of a manifesto. The impact was immediate. Public libraries ran out of copies, and reformist women’s clubs organized gatherings to debate solutions. Among the readers was Theodore Roosevelt, then the city’s police commissioner. Moved by the work, he invited Riis to join him on nighttime patrols and pushed for measures like demolishing unsafe housing and creating playgrounds in old scrap yards, a move that historians cite as the first tangible success of progressive urbanism.
Riis’s originality did not lie solely in his exposé. His greatest achievement was turning compassion into a direct aesthetic. He rejected the formal composition of studio photography and embraced unstable, almost improvised framing, where the grime of the floor and the startled expressions of the subjects spoke for themselves. Those images jolted viewers because they seemed to be taken from within, not as a souvenir from an urban safari but as a collective self-portrait. The magnesium flash flattened shadows and turned peeling walls into enormous blackboards no one could ignore.
His method inspired a generation later known as the muckrakers. Ida Tarbell exposed Standard Oil’s monopoly, Lincoln Steffens uncovered municipal corruption and Upton Sinclair revealed the horrors of Chicago’s meatpacking plants. All acknowledged Riis’s influence, who had shown the power of images as undeniable proof and the value of deep immersion in the scenes one sought to reveal.
Success brought criticism too. Some editors accused Riis of exploiting others’ suffering to sell books, while others pointed out that he simplified the ethnic complexities of the neighborhoods by using clichés about Italians or Jews. He acknowledged his class biases but insisted that silence was a greater sin. To counter charges of sensationalism, he organized public lectures in churches and social clubs, projecting his photographs and calmly narrating the stories behind each face. These gatherings became masterclasses in empathy, moving audiences from shock to solidarity, and often concluding with fundraising for schools, clinics and soup kitchens.
In 1901, Riis published The Battle with the Slum, a natural continuation of his work, and solidified his reputation as a crusading journalist. But the strain took its toll: exhaustion, early signs of tuberculosis and the grief of losing his first wife. He retreated part-time to a farm on Long Island, where he wrote moralistic novels and advised philanthropic foundations. His influence, however, did not fade. City governments in Chicago, Boston and Philadelphia adopted New York’s housing inspection model inspired by Riis’s advocacy. Photographers like Lewis Hine, Jessie Tarbox Beals and Dorothea Lange took up the camera as a tool for change, citing Riis as a forerunner of the concept of conscience with a lens.
His legacy continues to evolve in the twenty-first century. In Ribe, the Jacob A. Riis Museum opened in the building where the reporter spent his childhood. The museum combines virtual reality and vintage prints to reframe the dialogue between migration and citizenship, and it plans to open new exhibition spaces in December 2025. At the Bronx Documentary Center, an educational program running through 2024 and 2025 uses Riis’s glass plates as a starting point for teenagers to photograph their own neighborhoods and discuss housing, racism and access to healthcare. That a photographer born more than 170 years ago remains part of youth activism workshops today proves the enduring relevance of his work.
Riis’s aesthetic approach also speaks to the digital era. The magnesium flash has been replaced by the light of smartphones, but the ethical question remains: what does it mean to point a camera at someone else’s misery? Today’s networks compete for attention and risk turning poverty into spectacle. Riis offers an antidote. Before each shot, he listened to the subject’s story and ensured the image became part of a concrete reform strategy. That chain of intention has been diluted in the logic of instant likes, and recovering his example means shifting from instant exposure to responsible deliberation.
Another key contribution is the relationship between form and content. Riis was not seeking beautiful photographs but effective ones. Still, he developed a visual language that would influence documentary aesthetics: low angles that enlarge the figure of a child to underscore vulnerability, diagonals that guide the eye toward an open door as a metaphor for hope, close-ups that dissolve the symbolic barrier between the poor neighborhood and the middle-class reader. This combination of dynamic compositions and narrative text created a hybrid that anticipated the modern photobook.
It is significant that the title How the Other Half Lives took the form of a factual statement. It did not refer to urban legends or marginal tales; it asserted that there existed a marginalized half whose way of life deserved attention. The semantics became an argument. By stripping away unnecessary adjectives, Riis left room for the image to complete the exposé. That balance still serves as a model for anyone who wants to combine journalism and photography without slipping into redundancy.
Numbers confirm his impact. Between 1890 and 1900, infant mortality in Manhattan dropped by almost thirty percent, a change historians link to improved ventilation and sanitation in tenements following Riis’s campaigns. Urban reforms mandated air shafts, public bathrooms and the demolition of buildings with multiple health code violations. The process was neither linear nor free of resistance, but it marked the shift from piecemeal charity to structural public policy.
Look at a stone cutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred-and-first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not the last blow that did it, but all that had gone before.
Today, gentrification is reshaping neighborhoods once stigmatized, and many tourists seek charming apartments in former tenement buildings. It is paradoxical that the aesthetics of decay are now used as a marketing hook when Riis’s original goal was to eradicate decay. This twist forces a rethinking of heritage ethics. Preserving memory does not mean freezing poverty in an open-air museum; it means ensuring that original communities benefit from urban development. In that debate, Riis’s images stand as an uncomfortable witness, reminding us of the roots of inequality.
The centenary of Riis’s death was marked in 2014 by touring exhibitions, but the cultural agenda points to a new wave of reconsideration as artificial intelligence challenges trust in photography. Curators at the International Center of Photography are preparing a 2026 show pairing original plates with algorithmic reinterpretations trained on the same dataset. The curatorial question is whether a machine can capture the moral pulse that ran through each of Riis’s shots, or whether conscience is an irreplaceable ingredient.
At this point, it is worth emphasizing the relevance of his method. First, observe without romantic filters. Second, gather direct testimonies. Third, translate them into images that call for action. Fourth, link the publication to a timetable of possible reforms. This framework has inspired contemporary campaigns against child labor in South Africa, unequal access to water in Flint and mass evictions in Mumbai. The Danish-American photographer understood that a visual narrative has no weight if it is not anchored in political action.
Jacob Riis died in 1914, months before the trenches of Europe forever changed the perception of misery. He passed away on his farm, surrounded by fruit trees, faithful to the idea that dignity begins with a healthy roof and an open window. His gelatin negatives, carefully labeled, are now housed in the Museum of the City of New York and the Library of Congress. Every time a plate is digitized, a new reading emerges, because inequalities reinvent themselves but follow the same tragic script.
How the Other Half Lives is not a nostalgic artifact but an urgent manual for the present. While part of the world debates colonizing Mars, another part continues to fight for access to clean water and decent housing. Riis’s lesson is that no city is truly modern until it illuminates its basements. One hundred and thirty-five years ago, he used magnesium powder. Today we have LED, fiber optics and social media. The tools change, but the ethical obligation remains: to open the door that separates the visible half from the forgotten half and let the light reveal what words alone cannot. The rest is a collective responsibility.
