| Born third of fifteen children on May 3, 1849, Jacob Riis was raised in Ribe, Denmark. He immigrated to the United States in 1870 and struggled to find work, often sleeping the night police station lodging houses. Beginning in 1873, Riis began holding a number of different reporting jobs with The South Brooklyn News, The New York Tribune and The New York Evening Sun. Having experienced the trials and tribulations of living in extreme poverty and destitution, Riis became determined to use his skills in journalism to convey the tragedy of the slums to the public. Riis constantly stated that "poor were the victims rather than the makers of their fate." Riis was one of the first photographers to use a technique involving flash powder, making him able to photograph indoors and at night. This helped him capture a number of images of the slums. Riis published a number of photographs and a description of city life in December, 1889 in Scribner's Magazine. This section of the magazine got a large deal of publicity and Riis subsequently published a full length version, How the Other Half Lives, in 1890. Theodore Roosevelt, then New York City Police Commissioner, saw the book and immediately closed down the police lodging houses shown in the book. Riis published more than a dozen books including Children of the Poor (1892), Out of Mulberry Street (1898), The Battle With the Slum (1902), Children of the Tenement (1903) and his autobiography The Making of An American. Jacob Riis died on may 26th, 1914. |