EOTO Jou Heros- Jaccob Riis

Credit TIME

    Jaco Riis was a Documentary photojournalist and social reformer during the late 18 hundreds and early 19th century. 

    Before he became a highly regarded journalist he started out as a Danish immigrant who came to America at 21 years old working odd jobs where and when he could. But eventually, he got a job as a journalist at The New York Tribune. His role was being the police reporter working in new york cities high crime districts which is where he first met Theodore Roosevelt who was police commissioner at the time. This friendship between the two would grow and helped Riis's career grow later on. 

Credit Jacob Riis

Photo from Riis's image series "How the Other Half Lives"

    But he is most known for his 1890 photojournalism series “How the Other Half Lives.” This project visually brought to light the horrible living conditions and crisis affecting people living in New York City Tenements. Those people living there were typically members of the European immigrant community. As he himself was an immigrant he understood the struggles of these people and had once been where they were so he was even more emotionally invested in exposing these issues. Riis was truly a “muckraker” in his time helping those that had been neglected and ignored by the greater public and lawmakers and showcased their struggles and made them known and provided validity in the reports that had already been done. 

    

Riis understood that seeing is believing and that for the public, it was one thing to hear about the immigrant communities and read about their living situations in newspapers, but to see it and visually conceptualize the struggles made it tangible, so the government and public wouldn't able to refute it and turn a blind eye to the awful living conditions.

Credit Jacob Riis

Photo from Riis's image series "How the Other Half Lives"

Theodore Roosevelt even said Riis had, quote “the great gift of making others see what he saw and feel what he felt."

    Part of what made his work so successful was the advancement of photography. At the time the flash in cameras had just been developed which made it possible for dark- unlit areas to be seen and documented. So had it not been for this improvement in cameras it would not have been possible for Riis to do the work that he did. 

After doing research on Jacob Riis I've concluded that he was more than a reporter or journalist, he was a photojournalist turned activist, turned reformer. 

https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jacob-riis/overview.html
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91981589https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/pioneering-social-reformer-jacob-riis-revealed-how-other-half-lives-america-180951546/