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This photograph was taken by Jacob Riis, a Danish immigrant who is perhaps the most famous of all late 19th c. photographers in America. Riis served as a police reporter in New York for the Tribune and the Evening Sun from the 1870s through the 1890s. He was reform-minded in that he intended for his photos and writings about the real life conditions in New York to raise public awareness about the realities of the poverty-stricken masses in America’s rapidly growing industrial, urban areas. Many Americans who had never visited areas like the lower East Side of Manhattan were made aware of the horrible conditions that millions of people in the nation endured on a daily basis. • Relying on new developments in photography such as the flash, which was invented in 1887, Riis exposed the American public to photos such as this. In the Home of an Italian Rag-picker (c.1888), a photo he included in his widely read book How the Other Half Lives (1890), is a prime example of the kind of photographs he created. The photo depicts an Italian Woman holding a baby in her arms. The photograph is rather dark and the women is flanked by bags, barrels, and buckets. There is also a ladder to the left of the photo which appears to go up to an unknown space. The women seems to stare up towards the ceiling in despair. It is also possible that Riis is making a reference to the long tradition in Western art of depicitng the Madonna with child that goes back hundreds of years and continued through his time in the works of painters such as Mary Cassat.
The black and white photograph evokes sympathy from the viewer. The woman is apparently one of the many poor Italian immigrants that came across the Atlantic Ocean in what historians now call “The New Immigration” or “Second Wave Immigration” and inhabited, among other places, New York in the late 19thc. As the title suggests, she is a rag-picker – a person who goes through the trash in order to find food, clothing, or other discarded materials that might be useful. Perhaps most important, this photo demonstrates how Riis was able to employ flash technology in the service of public awareness and reform. Industrialization, urbanization, immigration, and technological advance had dramatically changed the way many city dwellers lived, and Riis’ photo-journalism was perhaps the most innovative and effective medium of communicating this new urban reality to the American population.
Late 19th c. - City, Industrialization, Science • City • Rapid Growth following Civil War • 20% in 1860, 40% in 1900 live in cities • N.Y., Phila., Chi., Bos. – several million each • Skyscrapers, Department stores, banks, office buildings • Vaudeville theaters, saloons, baseball fields, libraries, museums • Danger and Disease • Housing prices increased dramatically • N.Y. tenements designed to hold 50 house hold 400 • Some of the highest mortality rates in the world • Typhoid, diptheria, tuberculosis • Fires – 1871 – Chicago, 1872 – Boston • Severe poverty – many immigrants
Industrialization • 1900 – U.S. industrial giant of the world • Causes – transportation, communication, production • Efficiency increases as does competition • Emergence of monopolies • Wage Labor • Poor working conditions • Child Labor
Science/Technology • Darwinism – Charles Darwin • Natural Selection • Herbert Spencer – “survival of the fittest” • Social Darwinism popularized in U.S. by William Graham Sumner, John Fiske • Evolution means world is in constant flux – no beginning no end • Also – humans passive • Electricity • Light bulb, phonograph, street cars, machines in factories • Medicine
