Storyweb: Storytime For Grownups

This week on StoryWeb: Jacob Riis’s book How the Other Half Lives. Photojournalism can be an extraordinarily powerful way to raise the public’s concern about extreme situations. An early pioneer in this realm was Jacob Riis, whose 1890 book, How the Other Half Lives, exposed the underbelly of life in New York City during the Gilded Age, with a particular focus on the Lower East Side. Though Riis has been occasionally criticized for asking some of his subjects to pose for the photographs, the truth of their surroundings and the veracity of the degradation they faced on a daily basis cannot be denied. Along with the photographs is Riis’s text – chapters about the various ethnic groups that lived together on the mean, intensely crowded streets of Manhattan. The book achieved its purpose as it successfully provoked a public outcry about living and working conditions in the slums of New York. Most notably, Theodore Roosevelt, then the city’s police commissioner, answered Riis’s call to address the dire situations