Museum of the City of New York

“‘I scrubs.’ Little Katie from the W. 52nd Street Industrial School,” Jacob Riis, ca 1890. From the collection of Museum of the City of New York, 90.13.1.132

Little Katie

“Knee-pants" at forty five cents a dozen -- A Ludlow Street Sweater's Shop, Jacob Riis, ca 1889. From the collection of Museum of the City of New York, 90.13.1.151.

Introduction: Jacob Riis and His Work

By the turn of the 19th century, New York City’s Lower East Side neighborhood was the most densely populated place in the world. The neighborhood had a higher mortality rate than the rest of the city. Many reformers, like Jacob Riis, advocated for the creation of parks and playgrounds that would provide children with more places to exercise and access fresh air. They used photography to provide powerful visual evidence of the need for open, recreational spaces to combat the spread of disease.

Playgrounds and Parks in the City

Women's Lodging Room in W. 30th Street Station

Jacob Riis’s “Magic Lantern” Lecture

Jacob Riis used a different technique for each of these three photographs he took to show the plight of individuals in neighborhoods like the Lower East Side in the late 19th century. As you examine the images and read about his process, consider how his portrayals evolved and debate the ethics of Riis’s approach to depicting working-class New Yorkers.

From Candids to Portraits

Jacob Riis took advantage of a new technology - flash powder - to capture images that had previously been impossible to photograph: the city by night and dark interior scenes.

Images and Technology in Jacob Riis's Era

For immigrants in turn-of-the-century New York, labor frequently blurred the line between work and home, at times involving whole families. Examine this image and the text below to consider how different reformers envisioned solutions to the labor problems of the day.

Immigration and Labor at the Turn of the 20th Century

Jacob Riis (1849-1914) was a pioneering newspaper reporter, author, and social reformer in New York City in the late 19th century. His then-novel idea of using photographs to illustrate his writing about urban poverty created a rich historical record that was rediscovered in the 1940s and has since established Riis as a forerunner of modern photojournalism. The Museum of the City of New York holds the collection of NYC images that Riis used in his career. See more at https://collections.mcny.org

Jacob A. Riis: Revealing New York’s Other Half

Civics and Government

Social Studies

U.S. History

Visual Arts

The Arts

Jacob Riis began using photography as a tool to document conditions he hoped to expose on New York’s Lower East Side. However, he considered himself a writer and not a photographer. A recurrent subject in his work was the overcrowded and poor housing conditions in the Lower East Side. According to his book 

 (1890), there were barely any apartment vacancies in the neighborhood. The housing shortage, coupled with widespread low wages, drove many immigrants into severely crowded overnight lodging. Riis described the lodgings as a source of disease and despair, but also criticized census and health department officials as being ineffective in combating the problem. 

Riis accompanied a police officer in his late-night investigation of one such tenement and, aided by newly invented flash powder, took this photograph. In many of his early photographs Riis used the flash powder and the element of surprise to capture 

images of his subjects. A candid shot means that people in the image were not aware that someone was about to take their picture. 

1. What are the people doing in this photograph?

2. What else do you see in their surroundings?

3. How might it have felt to be one of the people in this candid imaget?

4. Describe the lighting in the photograph. Where is the light coming from in this photograph? 

5. This is a candid shot, which means that people in the image were not aware that someone was about to take their picture. Does this affect your interpretation of the photograph? 

6, Why do you think Jacob Riis would have wanted to take this photograph? 

7. Do you think Jacob Riis had the right to take these photographs?

This photograph shows a group of men inside a dirty, dilapidated and crowded lodging room in a tenement house on Bayard Street. Each man paid five cents to live inside of this room.

90.13.1.158.jpg

Lodgers in a crowded Bayard Street tenement - "Five cents a spot."

The children of the city were a recurrent subject in Jacob Riis’s writing and photography. Riis believed, as he said in How the Other Half Lives, that “the rescue of the children is the key to the problem of city poverty, as presented for our solution today; that character may be formed where to reform it would be a hopeless task.” In accompanying texts he commonly emphasized his young subjects’ resourcefulness and intelligence, in the hope that he would engender sympathy for them and promote the idea that the city’s children were among the undeserving poor who could succeed if reformers helped improve their circumstances. He took several photographs of children he described as “street Arabs,” an archaic term for homeless or partly homeless children who wander in the streets. 

Unlike in “Five Cents a Spot,” which was a 

the children in this picture, asking them to sit and lie in this spot so that he could take a photograph. Although it is meant to show children sleeping at night, the photograph was not taken at night and the children know they are being photographed.  

1. Describe what you see in this photograph. 

2. Why do you think Jacob Riis chose to photograph this scene? How might he expect viewers to react? 

3, Unlike in “Five Cents a Spot,” which was a candid photograph, Jacob Riis posed the children in this picture. Do you think that makes the photograph less effective? Why or why not? 

This photograph shows three boys sleeping outside, curled around a barrel near a doorstep.

90.13.1.124.jpg

Street Arabs -- night boys in sleeping quarters.

Jacob Riis often photographed children he described as “little mothers,” who bore responsibility for cooking and cleaning for their families or taking care of other children in their households. “Little Katie,” portrayed in his 1892 book 

Jacob Riis used a different technique here and took a 

of Katie, who is looking directly at the camera. Here is what he wrote about her:

"The serious responsibilities of life had come early to Katie. On the top floor of a tenement [crowded, low-cost apartment building] in West Forty-ninth Street she was keeping house for her older sister and two brothers, all of whom worked in the hammock factory, earning from $4.50 to $1.50 a week. They had moved together when their mother died and the father brought home another wife…Katie did the cleaning and the cooking…The picture shows what a sober [serious], patient, sturdy little thing she was, with that dull life wearing on her day by day. At the school they loved her for her gentle ways. She got right up when asked and stood for her picture without a question and without a smile. “What kind of work do you do?” I asked, thinking to interest her while I made ready. “I scrubs,” she replied, promptly, and her look guaranteed that what she scrubbed came out clean."

1. Based on the photograph and the excerpt from Riis’s book 

2. What role does she play in her household? 

3. How is Katie, the subject of this photograph, interacting with the viewer? With the photographer?

of the photograph affect the way you feel about Katie? (Composition means the arrangement of the different parts of the photograph).

5. How does the composition of this photograph compare to the other two photographs in this slideshow?

This photograph shows a girl, Katie, who was interviewed by the photographer. When asked what sort of work she did, she responded, "I scrubs."

Resource Kits

Object Library

Museums

Jacob A. Riis: Revealing New York’s Other Half

From Candids to Portraits

Background Knowledge

"Five Cents a spot"