This photograph, titled “Sleeping Quarters”, was taken in 1905 by Jacob Riis, a social reformer who exposed the harsh living conditions of immigrants residing in New York City during the early 1900s and inspired urban reform.

During the late 1800s, America experienced a great influx of immigration, especially from eastern and southern Europe, to meet the demand for low-wage workers required by growing factories and industries produced from the industrial era.  “In 1890, four out of five New Yorkers were foreign-born, a higher proportion than in any city in the world.”[1]

But life in America was harsh for these immigrants, who were especially vulnerable to poverty, racism, and exploitation in an unfamiliar land where they did not know the language.  With the large amounts of immigrants moving into cities, the newcomers were forced to live in overcrowded apartments called tenements. The compact living areas and lack of proper sewage and sanitation systems led to filthy living conditions and the easy spread of diseases like cholera, typhoid, and yellow fever.[2] During the early 1900s, as people began to notice the corruption behind several areas of American society and strive for reform,  some focused on helping ease the plight of immigrants. This included Jacob Riis, a Danish immigrant whose book “How The Other Half Lives”, depicting photographs of immigrant slums in New York City, shocked the nation and greatly drove urban reform efforts.

Riis was originally from Denmark and came to the United States in 1870 when he was twenty-one. While working at random odd jobs, he developed a passion for journalism. He saw firsthand the harsh living conditions in the city and felt that “there was a clear connection between miserable housing conditions and the city’s high rates of mortality and premature death.”[3]

Riis started reporting on the hardships of city life, hoping to strike a chord with middle-class and wealthy readers. Unfortunately, in the beginning he felt he was not making an impact. Around this time, flash powder was invented, which created artificial light to allow people to take pictures at night and indoors. Riis, seeing its great potential, started incorporating photography into his journalism. He is now credited for the creation of documentary photography.[4]  Although he was a self-taught photographer, his photos did their job in telling the brutal reality of the average New York immigrant by capturing the overcrowded tenements, the filthy streets, and the weary faces of adults and children. The featured photograph “Sleeping Quarters” shows a classic example of this. The image depicts the very cramped living space of  eight immigrant men.  The “bed” the two men are sleeping on to the left appears very hard and uncomfortable. The ceiling and walls are dirty and cracked. The fact that the dining table, beds, utensils, pots, and hanging clothes are all in the picture suggests that this one room is their entire living space. The beer bottle, empty cans, and plates as well as their relaxed poses, make the men look as if they have just come back after a long day of work. All these aspects of the photo help Riis to depict the overcrowded and dirty living conditions of the immigrants who came to work in the US during the late 1800s.

Some historians recently argue that there was a divide between Riis’ pictures and his language, which they claim perpetuated racial stereotypes. For example, he writes that “Money is their God” about the Jews and that “Like the Chinese, the Italian is a born gambler.”[5] Some also say that his depiction of the filthy living conditions provided fuel for immigration restrictionists who felt that the new immigrants were an inferior breed of people. However, it cannot be denied that his work was a driving factor in urban reform. He travelled and gave a lecture called “The Other Half: How it Lives and Dies in New York” and used lantern slides to project his photographs onto a large screen, drawing large crowds. His book How The Other Half Lives became a best seller.[6]  He helped turn one of the filthiest portions of the city, Mulberry Bend, into a public park. In what he considered his most major accomplishment, he helped reveal the hazards of city water contamination, rousing enough public support to force city leaders into taking efforts to ensure pure water in the future.[7] His photographic documentation helped to bring about change to the harsh living conditions of immigrants in the New York City slums.

Below are a few other photographs by Jacob Riis:

To look at more photos by Jacob Riis, click here

Footnotes:

[1] David E. Shi, America: A Narrative History Volume 2 (Eleventh Edition). ed by Jon Durbin (W. W. Norton & Company, 2019), 777.

[2]Ibid., 775.

[3] Kristine Somerville, “Flowers and Thugs: The Slum Photos of Jacob Riis,” The Missouri Review 38, Number 2 (2015): 107.

[4] Ibid., 109.

[5] Edward T. O’Donnell, “Pictures vs. Words? Public History, Tolerance, and the Challenge of Jacob Riis,” The Public Historian 26, no. 3 (2004): 9.

[6] Kristine Somerville, “Flowers and Thugs: The Slum Photos of Jacob Riis,” The Missouri Review 38, Number 2 (2015): 104.

[7] Ferenc M. Szasz, Ralph F. Bogardus, and Ralph H. Bogardus. “The Camera and the American Social Conscience: The Documentary Photography of Jacob A. Riis.” New York History 55, no. 4 (1974): 410.

 

References:

O’Donnell, Edward T. “Pictures vs. Words? Public History, Tolerance, and the Challenge of Jacob Riis.” The Public Historian 26, no. 3 (2004): 7-26. Accessed March 30, 2020. doi:10.1525/tph.2004.26.3.7.

Shi, David E. America: A Narrative History Volume 2 (Eleventh Edition). Edited by Jon Durbin. W. W. Norton & Company, 2019.

Somerville, Kristine. “Flowers and Thugs: The Slum Photos of Jacob Riis.” The Missouri Review 38, no. 2 (2015): 99-109. doi:10.1353/mis.2015.0020.

Szasz, Ferenc M., Ralph F. Bogardus, and Ralph H. Bogardus. “The Camera and the American Social Conscience: The Documentary Photography of Jacob A. Riis.” New York History 55, no. 4 (1974): 408-36. Accessed March 30, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/43460145.