Documentary Photography in America

In How the Other Half Lives, the author Jacob Riis sheds light on the darker side of tenant housing and urban dwellers. He goes to several different parts of the city of New York witnessing first hand the hardships that many immigrants faced when coming to America. His journalism and photographs of the conditions of the tenant housing helped led the way of reformation in the slums of New York. His research opened the eyes of many Americans to the darker side of the nation's lower class. Though it seems that he blamed both the victims and the board forces of society, I believe that he placed more of the blame on the board forces for the conditions that many immigrants faced.

In “Ways of Seeing”, John Berger, an English art critic, argues that images are important for the present-day by saying, “No other kind of relic or text from the past can offer such direct testimony about the world which surrounded other people at other times. In this respect images are more precise and richer literature” (10). John Berger allowed others to see the true meaning behind certain art pieces in “Ways of Seeing”. Images and art show what people experienced in the past allowing others to see for themselves rather than be told how an event occurred. There are two images that represent the above claim, Arnold Eagle and David Robbins’ photo of a little boy in New York City, and Dorothea Lange’s image of a migratory family from Texas; both were taken during the Great Depression.

Through the late 1800s and the early 1900s, the division between financial classes was great. Big businesses and monopolies ruled the market, making great financial powers such as J.P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and more. On the other hand, middle to lower class citizens struggled to pay their bills, lived in houses of fifteen people, worked in mine shafts from the age of twelve, and had miserable lives in the city. The lives of the lower class was captured by Jacob Riis. Jacob Riis was an American journalist most famously known for his photographs of the slums of New York City. He compiled his photograph into a book called, How the Other Side Lives. This set of photographs inspired the social welfare reform effectively through American cities because it brought the issue to the people.

In Jennifer Baichwal’s The True Meaning of Picture, she focused on the subject of American photographer Shelby Lee Adams’ works. Adams’ pieces emphasize the culture people in poverty from the Appalachian Mountains. Baichwal also spends some time focusing on the controversy of the photographer’s images. The documentary shows direct quotes from Adams himself, the subjects of his pictures, the subjects’ family, and even art critiques. The film collides the views of all these people so that we may learn more about the Appalachian people. Throughout the course of the documentary, the

For this essay the works of Robert Draper, author of “Why Photos Matter,” and Fred Ritchen, author of “Photography Changes the Way News is Reported,” will be analyzed. Though both deal with the topic of photography, their take on the matter is very different. While Ritchen is a photographer who writes on “what professional photographers will be doing in the future,” Draper is a writer for the National Geographic writing on how the photographers of the magazine share “a hunger for the unknown.” Both writers, however, write on the topic of photographers having a deeper understanding of their subjects, Ritchen due to research and practice, and Draper because the photographers “sit [with] their subjects, just listening to them.” In both essays the need for a deeper understanding of the

As immigrants migrated to the United States, cities became cramp, living conditions were poor, and working conditions were careless. In document one, the image taken by Jacob Riis, in 1890, shows a group of immigrants living in a tiny and filthy room. It is clear that all five of the men live in that single room because there is a stove, pans, and a bed all in one area. It is also clear that they have a poor living condition because there are cracks in the wall and dirty clothes. Also, Jacob Riis is known for his work How

While emotions were extremely high in the sense of angst for a better life, photography provided a new sense of reality to Americans and for others around the World. Photography all around the World is unlike anything else of its kind. People are able to tell stories and elicit emotions that bring the audience to that desired response. Throughout the 1930’s, photography from governmental institutions or advancements alone brought a new beginning to the end of a terrible time that Americans all around the nation

show society the how much of a problem this was. Using newly-developed technology, he was

The first thing I will write about is a person, Jacob Riis. A esteemed author of the book “How the other half Lives”, published in the 1890s. Riis was a pioneer in the time when photography was first starting to catch on. In Riis’s photos he took pictures of people who lived in the slums of the major cities and how they lived. He was termed a Muckraker by our late president Theodore Roosevelt, because journalists like him would, as he would say, rake through all the good things and bad on the ground and only report the bad of the world. But Riis was one of the men of his era

Jacob Riis photographed the slums of New York at the turn of the century, where as many as 300,000 people per

Upon earning employment as a reporter in 1873, Jacob Riis intended to expose the deplorable living conditions within the slums of New York city as well as the police department shelters that he himself had to stay in. The living conditions in the slums were terrible for the tenants, as the tenements were dark with poor air quality, overcrowded, unsanitary, and filled with crime and illnesses. At the time, most of the residents in the slums were immigrants and there were no sanitary laws to regulate housing conditions. By contrast, Lewis Hine became a photographer for the National Child Labor Committee in 1908 to advocate for reform and child labor laws. During the time, society had become industrialized and children were expected to work to support their families. These child laborers were overworked, not payed well, and did not receive education because it was not mandated. Hine took photographs of child laborers and factory workers in order to communicate the exploitation that these workers were enduring

In 1890, Jacob Riis, a Danish immigrant worked as a police reporter and photographic journalist in New York City. “How the Other Half Lives,” prompted legislative reforms, focused attention on the desperate lives of poor urban immigrants and left an enduring mark on the history of documentary photography.” (NY TIMES). During this time, America was going through social and economic stress due to rapid industrialization. It was a time full of greed and neglect from the wealthier class leaving the middle and poor class helpless and suffering day to day. Jacob Riis used his photography to document real lives that were being affected by this crisis and presented these photos to the public to open their eyes to what was going on. The economy, society, and government started to be controlled by large corporations who were owned by immigrants filled with greed and materialism. With this industrialization, Riis documented the over worked lower class who were given low wages and placed in overpriced slums. The real world did not notice the truth behind this madness until Riis’s photography opened their eyes.

The work of Jacob Riis impacted America during the 19th century because his works made the public and powerful people more aware of the harsh conditions in which poor people in the cities lived. Many of his photographs depicted filthy women and children living in cellars and rundown tenements, with hardly any belongings, hope seemingly destroyed by the harsh realities of slum life. His pictures destroyed the common image of home. One picture shows a family making cigars and another of a man eating alone in a filthy cellar. To get his point across, Riis photographed deteriorating tenements. People who saw Riis' works were horrified at the nasty conditions in the dark tenement housing, the unhealthy factories and overcrowded schools. His works

Before starting this project, I knew very little about photography, photographers, or exactly how much impact photographical images have had on our society. I have never taken a photography class, or researched too in depth about specific pictures or photographers. This project has allowed me to delve deeper into the world of photography in order to understand just how much influence pictures can have over society’s beliefs, emotions, and understandings’. I have have chosen two highly influential photographers, Diane Arbus and Dorothea Lange, who I have found to both resonate with me and perfectly capture human emotions in way that moves others.

Photographs are re-collections of the past. This essay is about photography, memory, and history and addresses the relationship between photographic images and the need to remember; it is based on the notion that seeing is a prelude to historical knowledge and that understanding the past relies on the ability to imagine. At the same time, the role of thought and imagination in the production of society--as reflected in the earlier work of Louis Althusser (1970), Maurice Godelier (1984) and perhaps more significantly, Cornelis Castoriadis (1975), suggests yet another role for photography in the construction of a social and cultural reality. Photographs in capitalist societies contribute to the production of information and participate in the surveillance of the environment where their subjective and objective qualities are applied to the private uses of photographic images in the perpetuation of memory.