Cheryl i am an exhibit director and at the library of congress. Barbara i am the curator of this exhibit and an historian in the Manuscript Division of the library of congress. Cheryl this exhibition 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, the riis papers have been married with the photographs that are a stellar collection at the museum of new york. We picked the word copresentation carefully because the exhibition here actually follows an exhibit that was at the museum of new york and really, that exhibit, which was called, jacob riis revealing new yorks other half, was slightly different. It looks at riis in a slightly different way, 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 number 3000 in the Manuscript Division and are really featured well in this exhibition and 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 were 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. He is kind of on the cusp between older models of poverty from the gilded age in the late victorian period and more progressive, governmental kinds of policies and solutions. So 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 when later, he was in new york, he had a lot of sympathy for truant young boys. Some of his articles are about truancy and how we can get kids into school. He spoke 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 was homeless. Was 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 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 that was published on the occasion of this exhibition. My engagement with the collection started in the 1980s when i was curator of the museum of princeton photographs of the museum of the city of new york which owns riis 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. 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 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 his 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. These beautiful enlarged pictures along with excerpts from his writing and 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 most were in Poor Condition and not exhibitable at all. Working with museum staff, i applied for a grant from the National Endowment for the 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 aestheticize him or turn him into an artist. He himself never worked in the dark room. He took his negatives to several i need lantern slides. He himself used the camera but did not, was not an expert technician. So we wanted very expert technicians the museum hired to make these prints to make not to aestheticizie them, but simply to make contact prints from the negative and 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. To the left is perhaps his most famous photograph. It is called bandits roost. 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 that 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. The picture was copied by Martin Scorsese in the 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, he was 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 that could illuminate the darkness and he said, a ha 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. There are actually two images, but that one is the most famous image. The other irony is that his most famous image was not actually taken by him. The flash photographs, what i think is the most important of the flash photographs is one called five cents a spot. What did is demonstrating, people that paid five or seven cents per night to have temporary lodging in a tenement house, where they were not living but they 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. 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 essentially raiding the place, saying, get out, this is illegal. Entering the room, which only had the slightest bit of light from a coal stove 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. It is a horrific scene. He used that picture to try to enforce, arouse authorities to enforce the laws about these lodging houses. He describes that in his book. 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. 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 in how the other half lives, his first famous book. Katie was in his second book which came out in 1882 called children of the poor. In that book, he was more like a social worker or caseworker. He had discussions with his subject matters. Here, the lodgers were surprised by men bursting into the room and taking a photograph. Katie, he talked to katie and learned her name and her story. Her mother had died. She was living with her siblings in a tenement. He took this picture at the 52nd Street Industrial school. When he said, what do you do, katie said i scrubbed. So her older siblings were working in a hammock factory during the day, but katie stayed home. She is nine years old and she scrubbed and cooked for the family and also went to school when she could. 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. On you see the Lower East Side where riis was primarily working. And it is astounding, just how many people are sort of crammed into, 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 speaks to that density. The crowdedness, 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 in the exhibit, 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 published in 1901. He also gave this as a lantern slide lecture. And we have in his collection, his notes from a lantern slide lecture, which are based on his book, battle of the slum. 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. 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 didnt know the difference between east and west. Here he is, gets out in a metropolis of new york and there are no buffalo. The first thing he did was he bought a revolver. He was making fun of himself. Often, he was telling jokes in his lectures. This is a funny story about this green kid getting off the boat and buying a revolver he strapped outside of his coat. He was strutting down broadway, and a policeman stopped him and said, son, maybe you 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 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 that is 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. 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 settle first in brooklyn and then in Richmond Hill and have a family. A lot of jacob riis motivation in life is that everyone should have a healthy, safe, and happy 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 in the middle, and his five children. There were some other children that died young. 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 that barbara described earlier. What we have here is actually a camera, a detective camera so this was sort of a stealth camera that could be used without a tripod, it could be held by the strap on the side. It gave the photographer some mobility. The other thing that was an innovation and 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 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. 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. This flash powder holder was not much better and very dangerous. You would put the magnesium should flash powder in the pan. Probably take a fuse, light the fuse and it would go off in a big boom. And 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. There is also the question of how he used the photographs. He made these initial photographs between 1887 and 1892, that was the peak time frame of his photography. And he really saw himself not as a photographer. He thought he was using photography as a tool for his journalism. So we have to remember that at the same time he was doing the lectures and showing them as lantern slides, he was also still a Police Reporter. His intent was that he would use these images as illustrations of his articles. 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. 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 technology was not there yet to do halftones. They made flat halftones in magazines and journals for which riis wrote as a freelance journalist. It was not really until the 1890s that the quality was good enough that they had good reproduction of photographs. At that time, riis stopped grass stopped taking photographs and he purchased photographs taken by other people. His original idea was to appeal visually and combine the image and 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, 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 at 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. He would basically follow the police when they would get a call where a murder happened or a crime, and he would write about the story. He got a lot of Human Interest stories from this. 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 the department of health or the Sanitation Division when they were doing investigations of