Transcripts For CSPAN3 American Artifacts Jacob Riis Exhibit

CSPAN3 American Artifacts Jacob Riis Exhibit July 12, 2024

In the Manuscript Division of the library of congress. Cheryl this exhibition jacob riis revealing how the other half lives is a copresentation with the museum of the city of new york. It is the first time that the collections of the library of congress and the jacob riis papers have been married with the photographs that are in the stellar collection at the museum of the city of new york. We picked the word copresentation very carefully because the exhibition here actually follows an exhibit that was at the museum of the city of new york and that exhibit was called jacob riis revealing new yorks other half was slightly different. It looks at riis in a slightly different way, and sort of concentrating more on his biography, more on his photography. Here we are looking at riis as the journalist, because that is the strength of our collection. The papers here, which number 3000 in the Manuscript Division, are really featured well in this exhibition and sort of come to the forefront. Barbara we also really wanted to emphasize the combination of the photographs and manuscripts in terms of jacob riis career as a photojournalist. Often people think of him as either a writer or a photographer. We are emphasizing the combination of those two things and his role as a communicator. We have organized the exhibit by the different ways and different mediums riis used as a Police Reporter, a writer, a photographer, as a reformer, and as an ally with other people who are active in social change movements to get the word out and educate the public about urban poverty, about immigration, and the density of housing in lower manhattan, and to provide solutions to those kinds of issues. He really is a creature of the gilded age. He comes into real celebrity in the 1890s and early 1900s. So he is kind of on the cusp between older models of poverty from the gilded age in the late victorian period and the new progressive, more governmental policies and solutions. He had a foot in both worlds. That is another one of our major points in the exhibit. Jacob riis was born in 1849 in denmark. He was the son of a schoolteacher and was basically raised in this very beautiful small town in denmark. He was a rebellious youth and even though he was the son of a teacher, he was not a good student although he loved to read. He played hooky a lot and later when he was in new york, he had a lot of sympathy for truant young boys. A lot of his articles are about truancy and how we can get kids into school. He wrote from personal experience. A lot of what he wrote about he did have personal experience because he was an immigrant to the United States. When he was 21 years old, in 1870, he came to the United States by himself. He had a very hard time initially here finding work. He did all kinds of odd jobs. Worked as a laborer, worked as a doortodoor salesman, sometimes homeless. Sometimes sleeping at night in homeless shelters and police lodging houses. All of this experience he brought into his articles later when he was more established as a Police Reporter and actually had a salaried job in the lower part of manhattan. Bonnie my name is bonnie yochelson. I wrote the complete collection catalog of riis photographs published on the occasion of this exhibition. My engagement with the collection started in the 1980s when i was curator of the museum of the city of new york which owns his new york photographs. There is a great paradox to riis photographs. He was a journalist and celebrity. He saved all of the documentation of his career. He wanted to be remembered for posterity. He created scrapbooks, he saved his manuscripts. Every scrap of paper. And he abandoned his photographs because he did not think they were of any value apart from his words, arguments, articles, and his publications. The way they were discovered is really a fascinating story. Riis died in 1914. In the 1940s, a photographer named Alexander Alland noticed in riis book how the other half lives that on the title page it says with illustrations after photographs by the author. He said to himself, where are these photographs . After several years of searching, he tracked down rii son and with much coercing, got riis son to try to find the pictures which turned out to be in the attic of his familys home in queens, new york, that was about to be torn down. His son discovered a box filled with 400odd negatives, 300odd lantern slides, and almost 200 paper prints and delivered them to Alexander Alland, the photographer. Who, again, taking a couple of years, he created an exhibition from the negatives, making beautiful prints, modern prints from the negatives and working with the curator with the museum of new york to put on an exhibition called battle of the slums. Named for one of riisbooks. It established riis as an important photographer. That is how he entered the history of photography. My problem as a curator in the 1980s was, we dont have prints to show because those almost 200 vintage prints, about half were not by riis at all, and the rest, most were in Poor Condition and not exhibitable at all. Working with museum staff, i applied for a grant from the National Endowment for humanities and we made a set of what they call vintage material prints from the negatives. The purpose being to make prints that would look like those that riis would recognize. Not to turn him into an artist. He himself never worked in the dark room. He took his negatives to several commercial studios and said i need prints. I need prints. I need lantern sides. He is the camera but was not in any way an expert technician. We wanted these very expert technicians the museum hired to make these prints to make contact prints from the negatives. That is what is on exhibition here to represent riis photographs. At the beginning of the exhibit, we have chosen three very famous photographs from the lexicon of jacob riis. And to the left is perhaps his most famous photograph. It was in the middle of an area called mulberry bend, which is a section of mulberry street near baxter street that became a particular cause celebre for riis in terms of urban reform. He eventually would succeed in working with municipal authorities to demolish mulberry bend and replace it with a park which is another story we tell deeper into the exhibit with original items. Again, the paradox about riis is that he himself said he was a photographer after a fashion. In other words, he was not a real photographer. He used the camera for very few years, less than 10 years. He only took about 300 pictures. About a third of which were family snapshots and other things not of historic importance. His most famous picture today is bandits roost which shows a couple of italian toughs wearing bowler hats. In fact, that picture was copied by Martin Scorsese in a movie, gangs of new york. It is kind of an iconic image. When he first had the idea to use photographs to illustrate the slums in 1887, he reached out to a friend that was a photographer and found two photographers who were interested in flash. Flash photography was the reason he had the idea to even use photographs at all. He was a writer, journalist, writing in the daily newspaper about the conditions in the slum. He read in the newspaper in 1887 that there was this New Invention of flash powder that could eliminate the darkness and he said, a ha so he worked with two other photographers who were serious amateurs interested in flash, interested in the technology. Among their photographs is bandits roost which was taken with a stereoscopic camera with two lenses. So there are actually two images, but that one is the most famous image. Another irony is that his most famous image was not actually taken by him. Another famous one is demonstrating people that paid five cents or seven cents a night to have temporary lodging. Inside a tenement house where they were not living but would come to sleep for the night. Those people on the floor paid five cents. The people on the shelf paid seven. There was a law in new york that you had to provide a bed of some kind for someone and the lowest price you could charge was seven cents. So the title indicates to the viewer that this was illegal shelter. And riis took the picture. That was taken by him, not by the other amateurs. He took the picture with a member of the sanitary police, who were raiding the place, saying, get out, this is illegal. So, entering this room, which only had the slightest bit of light from a coal stove that was providing heat for the room, riis entered with the police, set up his camera, essentially set off an explosion which sounded like a gun, a boom with smoke and fire, and what is captured in the picture is the faces, some people are sleeping and others have been aroused, and look stricken, for good reason, by the circumstance. The picture in his description of the scene in his book, he says there were 13 people in a tiny little room, including an infant. A screaming infant. So it is a horrific scene. He used that picture to try to enforce, arouse authorities to enforcing the laws about these lodging houses. He describes that in his book. So that is a fantastic example of one of riis flash photographs, creating a powerful portrait of inhumane conditions. A picture like that, pictures like that have been criticized for essentially victimizing his subjects. He came in, there was no consent. He scared these people to death, and they look it. And that is a criticism, a modern criticism today of these flash photographs. It was not his intention, but it is from a contemporary point of view a problem. Barbara the middle photograph is the signature photograph for our exhibit. This is little katie. It represents another phase in riis approach to his subject matter and photography. Originally, he worked with amateur photographers to take the photographs. Then he started taking them himself. The bandits roost photograph and the five cent lodging photograph was in his first famous book. Katie was in his second book which came out in 1892 called children of the poor. In that book, he was more like a social worker or caseworker. He actually had discussions with his subject matters. Here, the letters were surprised the lodgers were surprised by men bursting into the room and taking a photograph. He talked to katie, and he learned her name. He learned her story. Her mother died. She was living with her siblings in a tenant. He took this picture at the 52nd Street Industrial school. When he said, what do you do, she said i scrubbed. She stayed home. She was nine years old. She scrubbed and cooked for the family and also went to school when she could. Cheryl this is a birds eye view of new york in 1879. Birds eye views were popular until slightly after the turn of the century. They put buildings and gave an idea of the density of space and put buildings in perspective. So you see the Lower East Side where riis was primarily working. It is astounding how many people are crammed and how many structures are crammed into this space. The u. S. Census bureau at the time said this was the most densely crowded city in the United States. 1. 5 Million People lived primarily in lower manhattan. Riis claimed it was the largest population, most densely populated city on earth. Which may or may not have been the case. But that is what he claimed in how the other half lives. I think if you look at this map, it really sort of speaks to that density. The issues that he was addressing. We have been talking about the importance that jacob riis had lived many of the issues he wrote about as a Police Reporter and how he came to the United States as an immigrant from denmark in 1870, he was 21 years old. And in our first case, we emphasize his life story or biography. One of the things we decided to do in making the exhibit is to use notes that we have in his manuscript collection at the library of congress from the making of an american, which was his autobiography which he published in 1901. He also gave this as a lantern slide lecture. And we have in his collection, his notes from a lantern slide collection. We have featured pages from the books in almost all the cases. Here, for biography, we used the very first one where he talks about his naivete when he first came to new york. Back in denmark, he loved to read american literature. Was quite fluid in english he was quite fluent in english when he came to the United States. One of his favorite authors was James Fenimore cooper. He had this vision as many scandinavians did that america was the wild west. He said we did not know the difference between east and west. Here he is, gets out in a in the metropolis of new york, and there are no buffaloes. The first thing he did was he bought a revolver. He was making fun of himself. He was often making jokes in his lecture. This is a funny story about this green kid getting off the boat and buying a revolver he strapped outside of his coat. Strutting down broadway and a policeman stops him and says you may want to get rid of the gun. It is a funny story. It actually was a very hard time for jacob riis when he first came. He had a lot of difficulty making a living, finding work, he was unable to find steady work. He worked a lot of odd jobs. He got very depressed. One of the things we are showing from the New York Public Library is a wonderful early diary of his written partly in danish and then he switches to english. In the diary, it is about his loneliness when he first came here and his pining for his love, elizabeth, which was at that point unrequited. She was back in denmark. And his suicidal feelings. So it was very difficult in the beginning. There is a great love story with riis and his wife elizabeth. Eventually, she does succumb to his courtship and they marry in 1876 in denmark and come back and they settle first in brooklyn and then in Richmond Hill in queens, new york, and have a family. A lot of jacob riis motivation in life is that everyone should have a healthy, safe, and Healthy Family like he does. He writes a lot about families and the welfare of children in particular. He would often tell his audiences there is no difference between these children or yours and mine. That is his wife elizabeth in the middle and the five children. There were some other children that died young. Cheryl next, we are going to talk about what looks like a strange assemblage of equipment. Things that we are not used to seeing these days. This is photographic equipment. Very similar to what riis would have used on his raiding parties barber described earlier. That barbara described earlier. What we have here is actually a camera, sort of a stealth camera that could be used without a tripod, it could be held by the strap on the side. So it gave the photographer some mobility. The other thing that was an innovation and sort of allowed for a lot of mobility at that time was the invention and introduction of dry plate negatives. Previous to this time, you had to coat a plate with collodion. It was a very laborious process. You had to expose your negative right away. This enabled you to buy these plates already prepared. This was the size of the plate. This was a holder here. You could carry a few with you and make a number of exposures. In a particular outing. What we have in the back here is a flash pan. Riis learns about the german invention of magnesium flash powder in 1887. He is very interested in it. He understands that he could be using this to great effect for his work. As barbara said earlier, the first application of the flash powder was put into pistols and you would go in and set it off and there would be a big boom, a big flash of light, and it would of course scare the people being photographed to know and. End. No this flash powder holder was not much better and very dangerous. You would put the magnesium flash powder in the pan. Take a fuse, light the fuse and it would go off in a big boom. Again, you would have a big burst of light and enable the photographs that riis took in these dark spaces, that these spaces would be illuminated so you would get some image on the dry plate. Barbara there is also the question of how he used the photographs. He really saw himself not as a photographer. He thought he was using photography as a tool for his journalism. We have to remember that at the same time he was doing lectures and showing them as lantern slides, he was also still a Police Reporter. And his intent was that he would use these images as illustrations of his articles. And in this case, which is about him as a Police Reporter, we wanted to demonstrate how it would look when you had an actual print of the photograph and how it would show as a line drawing in the periodical press. So what would happen is an illustrator would be hired, they would make a line drawing and then an engraving, and then that would be printed in the newspaper. The reason for that is that the technology was not there yet to do half tones the newspapers. They did make flat halftones in magazines and journals for which riis wrote as a freelance journalist. But it was not really until the 1890s that the quality was good enough to have good reproduction of photographs. At that time, riis stopped taking photographs and purchased photographs taken by other people. His original idea was to appeal visually and combine the image and the word in order to persuade people. Riis was hired to work on the beat, basically, reporting crimes and anything that happened through the police department. For six years, he was on night work where his newspaper office, where he worked for the new york tribune. We have a photograph from the library of congress collections of riis in the Tribune Office which was that 301 mulberry street right across the street from Police Headquarters. He is there with his friend and fellow reporter and riis is in the corner. His friend is at the desk. He would basically follow the police when they would get a call where a murder happened or a crime, and he would write about these stories. He got a lot of Human Interest stories. This is partly how he got access to the inside of tenement buildings. He was a recognized face. Many people in the neighborhood actually thought he was a doctor because he came so often with t

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