Jacob a Riis

How the Other Half Lives - Studies Among the Tenements of New York Jacob a Riis

Classic Books Library presents this brand new edition of "How the Other Half Lives" (1890) by Jacob Riis. This powerful collection of photographs depicts the slums of New York during the 1800s. As an émigré, Riis witnessed the poverty and crowded conditions of the city, and turned to photojournalism to document street life. Mastering the innovative use of flash, and being one of the first to use the technology in photographic practice in America, Riis produced starkly honest and evocative images of the tenements. Riis (1849-1914) was a journalist and social documentary photographer born in Denmark. He emigrated to New York as a young man and became part of a large wave of immigrants that settled there in the late 1800s. After initially training as a carpenter, his journalistic career began when he was appointed as a trainee at the New York News Association. Later, Riis developed an interest in photography as a way to further illustrate the conditions of city slums that featured in his reports, and his first collaborative photojournalism work was published in 1888.