This Week in History: The pioneering work of journalist Jacob Riis
- ANTONE PIERUCCI
- Posted On
Some images just stick with you; they periodically appear in your mind’s eye and, like a tune you can’t get out of your head, pester you with their persistence.
Perversely, the sadder the subject matter of the image, the more staying power it seems to have.
How many of you who were alive then still recall the images of Jackie Kennedy in Dallas, captured just moments after her husband’s assassination?
Or the images taken on Sept. 11, 2001, of people covered in the same pasty white ash of the twin towers?
Moments like these, captured for posterity by the technology of photography, all contain one key element: pathos.
Stripped down to its mechanical parts, pathos is just a communication technique that appeals to the emotions of an audience. It’s a Greek word, which translates to “suffering” or “emotion” or, most telling of all, to “experience.”
You see, for an appeal to someone’s emotions to be truly effective, it has to reach an individual and elicit feelings that are already buried deep within him. Without empathy, pathos is completely ineffectual.
We remember the blood-spattered Jackie Kennedy because we, too, fear death and – however distantly – can imagine ourselves in a similar situation.
Those dust-caked businessmen and women, the dazed ghosts who stalk the thousands of photographs taken on 9/11, are so maddeningly haunting exactly because they look like we collectively felt that day in America: dazed and afraid, our entire world-view buried in that heap of twisted metal and concrete.
Newspapers and magazines publish these types of images – it’s their stock and trade, and has been so for decades.
Since 1942, Pulitzer Prizes for photography have been awarded to photographers who were able to capture moments in time – moments that embody quintessential elements of the human condition.
You probably already know some of them. The famous photo of the killing of Lee Oswald in 1964; the photo of a starving Ethiopian child, curled on the muddy ground, near death with a vulture perched feet away.
Photographs like these have an important history, one that many individuals contributed to in his/her own way. After all, the first photographer didn’t just start snapping world-class images. An industry has to crawl before it walks, let alone sprints headlong.
Perhaps the most important of these early photography trailblazers was Danish-American journalist Jacob Riis.
Born in 1849 in Ribe, Denmark, Riis immigrated to America as a young man. Like many immigrants of the time, he struggled to survive, and for a number of years Riis lived hand-to-mouth on the squalid streets of New York City.
Eventually, thanks to the kindness of strangers, he was able to get his feet under him. In 1873, he took a job as a police reporter for a local rag. Charged with covering all the murders, fires, robberies etc. of the Lower East Side, he remained intimately connected to the poverty of the city.
It was during these years as a police journalist that he began to experiment with the use of photography. He wasn’t the first American journalist to submit photographs with his columns, but he was the first to recognize the inherent power of the captured image to move his readers. Riis’s photographs were not merely garnish for his columns.
By the later 1880s, the now-veteran journalist began conducting his own investigation into the living conditions of the crowded tenement buildings that housed so many of the city’s immigrant population. Given his history with homelessness and poverty, this was a story near to his heart.
In order to capture the squalid living conditions inside the dim interiors of the tenements, Riis pioneered the use of flash photography.
With a collection of moving photographs to accompany his writing, Jacob Riis published his now-famous book “How the Other Half Lives.”
When it came out in 1890, Riis’s book shocked the nation; the photographs of half-clothed children huddled in the crumbling rooms of a tenement did not mesh with the gilded ideal most Americans had of themselves.
With the publication of his book sparking new legislation aimed at helping the poor, Riis became the first person to recognize the power of photographs to incite social reform.
Jacob Riis wasn’t done there. For the rest of his career, the man toured his home city and elsewhere in the nation, giving lectures on topics relating to social welfare.
On Jan. 12, 1894, for instance, he gave a public lecture on “The Need of Playgrounds and Open Space” in American cities.
With every lecture, including this one, his now-famously haunting photographs accompanied him, lending weight to his messages of reform.
Despite his groundbreaking work, posterity largely forgot Jacob Riis’s contributions in the years following his death in 1914. It was only after WWII, when the nation had scrapped itself through two world wars and a global depression, that America understood Riis’s raw images of human suffering in their entirety.
Even today, his photographs have the power to take one’s breath away, and remain embedded in one’s mind for a long time thereafter.
Antone Pierucci is curator of history at the Riverside County Park and Open Space District and a freelance writer whose work has been featured in such magazines as Archaeology and Wild West as well as regional California newspapers.