Long ago it was said that “one half of the world does not know how the other half lives.” That was true then. It did not know because it did not care. The half that was on top cared little for the struggles, and less for the fate, of those who were underneath, so long as it was able to hold them there and keep its own seat. (Riis 1) To his friend Theodore Roosevelt, Jacob Riis was known as “the most useful citizen in New York.” To everyone else, he was known as an author, a photographer, and, above all, a reformist. Throughout his career, Jacob Riis photographed the slums and tenement houses of New York City and brought about reform that would better the city and its inhabitants. Riis’ photographs, while brutally honest, depict poor immigrants and what they were forced to endure in order to survive. Contrary to the beliefs of James West Davidson and Mark Hamilton Lytle in “Images from the Other Half,” Jacob Riis was not merely a spectator in his line of work as a photographer and a reformist, but he was actively involved in the life of each one of his subjects. Himself an immigrant, Riis was born in Denmark in 1849 the third in a family of fifteen. Against the views of his father, Riis was an apprentice to a carpenter in Copenhagen from 1866 to 1870. Soon after, Riis immigrated to the United States to begin what would become a successful career at age 21. After arriving in New York, it was some time before Riis climbed his way out of poverty, something that separated him from his subjects that never did the same. In 1877, Riis found employment with the New York Tribune and the Associated Press as a police reporter. Riis soon began detailing the conditions of the slums on New York’s Lower East Side, which led to the establishment of the Tenement House Commission in 1884 and the creation of his book, How the Other Half Lives.
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