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

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

Minding the Baby, Cherry Hill

In Sleeping Quarters— Rivington Garbage Dump

Bandit’s Roost,1887–88

‘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

Street Arabs in Night Quarters

Street Arabs at Night, Mulberry Street

Little Susie in Gotham Court

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”

Baxter Street Alley, rag picker's row

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

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

A Scrub and her bed—The Plank, 1892

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

A young girl holds a baby in a doorway

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

Behind the Saint-Lazare station, Paris, 1932. Image courtesy of Magnum Photos.

The Decisive Moment

Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004)

Ephemeral human moments portrayed through a fusion of spontaneity and precise composition.

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.

Whole Families Sleep in One Room

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.

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.

The Crawlers

Street Life in London

John Thomson (1837-1921)

An early photography project documenting the living conditions of Victorian London’s urban poor.