Mirror with a Memory Essay

He emigrated to the United States in 1870 on a steamship, and was able to view the poor living conditions on the immigrants. Jacob at that time only had $40 in his pocket and a locket with a hair of the girl he loved. Upon his arrival in New York City he was not able to find his ideal job and had already worked through various jobs- ironworker, farmer, bricklayer, salesman, and more. It was not until 1873 when Riis decided to become a police reporter and he quickly found a purpose in life. He wrote about the living condition of immigrants that were worse in New York City in the neighbourhood of East Side. That area had it all; crime, poverty, and the infant death was 10% due to the small living tenements made for the immigrants. He was not like other reporters who would write on such issues, instead he took pictures of them through some of the basic photography skills he had taught himself. Most of the issues that those picture portrayed were; crowded tenements, dangerous slums, and street scene. According to the people they were able to understand picture better than text as most of them were illiterate, Riis was also able to publish his book in 1890 that focused on the life of the immigrants, How the Other Half Lives. Riis´ reasoning behind bringing awareness to that issue was “that every man’s experience ought to be worth something to the community from which he drew it, no matter what that experience may be.”

It is said that “The true content of a photograph is invisible, for it derives from a play not with form but with time”. This makes me think that the real content of a picture, which is what the photographer tried to express, is not evident to perceive unless an explanatory text is provided. In fact, I believe that our perceptions of pictures changes over time as the historical context do. In addition, our opinions are never fixed as they are influenced by our environment. Therefore, when looking at a particular picture at a given time, it is certain that our perception of it will be different in the future based on what happen between the first time and second time we saw it.

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

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

In 1888, Riis was given a job with the New York Evening Sun as a photojournalist (“Jacob Riis”). His pictures primarily portrayed the awful living conditions of those who lived in New York’s Lower East Side (“Jacob Riis Muckraker”). In 1889, Riis became a police reporter, which exposed him to the horrid living conditions. After seeing what really went on in parts of his new hometown, he decided

Riis, however, did not just use words to get his point across but used photographs to describe the living conditions and problems the poor were facing. During this era, Riis was what they called an investigative journalist also known as a muckracker (Hewitt, 594). He and other journalists were called muckrackers because they exposed tragic truths that the government did not want the public to know. In “How the Other Half Lives”, Riis took photos of those who lived in extreme poverty to get upper and middle class citizens to realize that these people needed help and that they should not be living the way they do. In Chapter 1: Genesis of the Tenement, Riis displays photographs of these tenements that poor families stayed in and goes on to explain how terrible and dangerous these tenements really were. In this Chapter, he states that the death of a child in a tenement was "plainly due to suffocation in the foul air of an unventilated apartment” (Riis, 1). Throughout the book he talks about the small rooms that more than one family was assigned to live in, the overcrowdiness, the filthiness of the tenements, the overcrowdiness of the tenement itself, and the stuffiness of the rooms. Riis’ main reason behind “How the Other Half Lives” was to show the misery, pain, and difficulty people were faced with on an everyday

Throughout the book Riis expresses his cruel feeling toward the Italians, Jews and the Chinese, while he remains astonishingly less critical of blacks and women. This book relates to the horrible living conditions and people in

The primary sources used by Buk-Swienty consist of primarily excerpts from Riss’s journals, letters, or articles. These pieces of evidence provide descriptions of events that occurred from the perspective of Riis. This use of evidence is very beneficial because it provides proof that the events described by Buk-Swienty are not fictitious and truly occurred. Moreover, the primary sources also contribute to the description and perspective of Riis developed by readers. As a result of reading Riis’ journal entries and articles, readers are able to learn more about Riis’ character. His writings demonstrate his values as an individual as well as his own opinions. Not only does Buk-Swienty include primary source evidence fro Riis’ journals but he also displays numerous photographs taken of Riis and by him. These photos show the artistic abilities of Riis as well as adds further value to Buk-Swienty’s high opinion of the journalist. The photos taken by Riis illustrate the poverty in the slums, which demonstrates to the reader just how wretched poverty was in the tenements. Therefore, the primary source evidence presented by Buk-Swienty offers more insight into Riis’ life and demonstrates his opinions and

picture is an attempt to connect with the reader’s emotions by showing the strong feelings

Just as the Bible’s opening chapter is named Genesis, Riis’s aptly named opening chapter, “Genesis of the Tenement,” gives a brief history on how the tenements came to be in the city and sets the scene for one of the most notorious slums in New York City, Five Points. Throughout the first several chapters, Riis talks in general of the dire situation of the people living in the tenements and the tenements themselves. He then goes on to discuss the Italians, Irish, Chinese, Jews, Arabs, blacks, women, and children within these tenements separately chapter by chapter. One may notice the copious amounts of stereotypes, prejudice in some sense, he uses when writing about the Italians, Irish, Chinese, and Jews. However, one has to remember the fundamental reason of his writing when reading

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

Photography is used to capture moments instantly. They can be used to compile memories or to convey a message. Artistic liberty is the ability for the artist to interpret their own message through their work. A creative project is a form of expressing one’s opinion, while also trying to get the viewers to think and also to question. There is always more than one interpretation about a piece of work; the artist may have one opinion but the viewer may form their own.

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.

Jacob Riis was a photographer who took photos of New York’s tenements, people, and streets in the nineteenth century. Riis’s intentions of taking photos and publishing his book was to inform society of what menacing conditions people lived in. Professor Charles Postel gave support to Riis’s arguments in his video, about the book. With his photos Jacob Riis published a book named, how the other half lives, which induced government reforms to improve the living conditions of these residents.Riis’s photos in his book how the other half live, and Charles Postels supporting statements of in his video illustrate a bigger picture of middle class men who faced the menace of violence, poverty, unsanitary environment, and no education.