"How the Other Half Lives", Jacob Riis (1849-1914)

In Poverty Gap, West Twenty-Fourth St. An English
coal-heaver’s home

In Sleeping Quarters— Rivington Garbage Dump

‘I Scrubs,’ little Katie from the West 52nd Street Industrial School, 1890–92,

An Old Rear-Tenement in Roosevelt Street

In the home of an Italian rag-picker, Jersey Street

“Knee-Pants” at Forty-Five Cents a Dozen—a Ludlow Street Sweater’s Shop

The backyard of a tenement, where laundry is drying and children and adults are outside, in the Five Points neighborhood, NYC

Bohemian Cigarmakers at work in their Tenement

Pupils in the Essex Market school in a poor quarter of New York

Lodgers in a crowded Bayard Street Tenement—‘“Five Cents a Spot”

James M’Bride, one of the city’s pensioners

One of four pedlars who slept in the celler of 11 Ludlow Street rear.

Two boys asleep at 2 a.m. in the press room of the "Sun" newspaper

Mrs. Benoit, a Native American widow, sews and beads while smoking a pipe in her Hudson Street apartment

Police Station Lodgers 11. In Oak Street Station.

Books

Rediscovering Jacob Riis: Exposure Journalism and Photography in Turn-of-the-Century New York

(University of Chicago Press, 2014)

Jacob Riis (55)

(Phaidon, 2001)

Jacob Riis: Reporter and Reformer

(Oxford University Press, 2005)

Jacob A. Riis: Photographer & Citizen

(Aperture, 1993)

Jacob A. Riis n°72

(Actes Sud, 1999)

Jacob A. Riis and the American City

(Associated Faculty Press, 1974)

Jacob A. Riis: Revealing New York's Other Half: A Complete Catalogue of His Photographs

(Yale University Press, 2015)

Jacob A. Riis: Social Reporter with Camera

(Lucida Pocket, 1987)

The Making of the Other Half: Jacob A. Riis and the New Image of Tenement Poverty

(Aarhus University Press, 2015)

How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York With Introductory Chapters and a Riis Chronology

(Palgrave Macmillan, 1996)

Related Projects

Mother Surrounded by Children, Dahlonega, Georgia, 1936

You Have Seen Their Faces

Margaret Bourke-White (1904-1971)

Human faces and living conditions in the American South during the Great Depression, capturing scenes of labor, poverty, and familial life.

A Night in London

Bill Brandt (1904-1983)

Social disparities, urban alienation, and nocturnal rhythms within 1930s London.

DePeyster statue, Bowling Green, looking north on Broadway, Manhattan, July 1936

Changing New York

Berenice Abbott (1898-1991)

Modernist exploration of 1930s New York's urban transformation, highlighting the contrast between historic architecture and the emergence of towering skyscrapers.

Sunday morning is the only time these cuties get a chance to get cleaned up... Image courtesy of ICP.

Naked City

Weegee (1899-1968)

Nighttime scenes of 1930s-1940s New York, portraying urban extremes of crime and social life through high-contrast flash photography and candid depictions of human emotion.

Hiroshima

Ken Domon (1909-1990)

Hiroshima survivors’ physical and emotional scars through stark, unstaged black-and-white social realist photography, emphasizing both suffering and resilience thirteen years after the atomic bombing.

Tulsa

Larry Clark (1943)

Unfiltered depiction of youth subculture in 1960s America, documenting drug use, violence, and intimacy through a deeply personal and immersive photographic approach.