In 1940s, a photographer named alexander land noticed in riis book how the other half lives, that on the title page it says, with illustrations after photographs by the author. So he said to himself, well, where are these photographs . And after several years of searching, he tracked down riis son and with much coercing got riis son to try to find the pictures which turned out to be in the attic of the familys home in queens, new york, that was about to be torn down. So his son discovered a box filled with 400 negatives, 300 odd lantern slides and almost 200 paper prints. And delivered them to alexander hollande, the photographer, who again, taking a couple of years, created an exhibition of from the negatives making beautiful prints, modern prints from the negatives and working with the curator at the museum of the city of new york to put on an exhibition called battle with the slum named for one of riis books in which these beautiful, enlarged pictures along with excerpts of riis writings established riis as an important photographer and thats how he entered the history of photography. So, my problem at the museum of the city of new york as a curator in the 1980s was, we dont have prints to show because those almost 200 vintage prints about, half of which were not by riis at at all and the rest of which were in very poor most were in Poor Condition and not exhibitable at all. So working with the museum staff, we applied for 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, not to turn him into an artist. He himself never worked in the dark room. He took his negatives to a commercial several commercial studios and said i need prints, i need lantern slides. So he himself used the camera, but was not in any way an expert technician. And so we wanted these very expert technicians who the museum hired to make these prints, not to do what alexander hollande did in the 1940s but to simply make contact prints from the negatives 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. And, to the left is perhaps his most famous photograph called bandits roost and it was in the middle of an area called mulberry bend, which was a section of mulberry street near baxter street. It became a particular cause celebre for riis in terms of urban reform. And 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 deep near the exhibit with original items. Again, the paradox about riis is that he himself said that he was a photographer after a fashion. In other words, that he wasnt a real photographer. He used the camera for very few years, less than ten years and he only took about 300 pictures, about a third of which were like family snapshots and, you know, other things that are not what we not of historical importance. His most famous picture today is bandits roost which shows a couple of tufts, italian tufts wearing bowler hats. In fact that, picture was copied by Martin Scorsese in a movie the gangs an of new york, so its a kind of iconic image. When he first had the idea to use photographs to illustrate the slums and that was in 1887, he reached out to a friend who was a photographer and he found two photographers who wanted to who were interested in flash. Flash photography was the reason he had the idea to even use photographs at all. He had was a writer, a journalist. He was writing in a 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 illuminate the darkness and he said aha. He worked with two other photographers who were serious amateurs who were interested in flash. They were interested in the technology. And among their photographs is bandits roost. Which was actually taken with a stereographic, stereoscopic camera which has two lenses so theyre actually two images of bandits roost but its the right side which has the two tufts in the bowlers. Thats the famous image. Another irony that riis most famous image was not actually taken by him but the flash photographs what i think is most important of the flash photographs is one called five sent a spot. What its demonstrating are people that paid five cents or seven cents a night to have temporary lodging inside a tenement house where they werent living but they would come to sleep for the night. And those people on the floor paid five cents and the people up on the shelf paid seven. There was a law in new york that you had to provide a bed of some kind, an independent bed, 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 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 and saying, this, you know, get up and out. This is illegal. So entering this room which only had this 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, you know, a boom with smoke and fire. And whats captured in the picture is the faces some people are still sleeping, and other people have been aroused and look sort of 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 that room. Tiny little room. Including an infant. A screaming infant. So its a horrific scene, and he used that picture to try to enforce, to try to rouse authorities to enforcing the laws about these lodging houses. And he describes that in his book. So that is a fantastic example of one of riis flash photographs creating a very powerful portrait of inhumane conditions. Picture like that, pictures like that have been criticized for essentially victimizing his subjects that he came in, that there was no consent, that he scared these people to death, and that they look it. And that this 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. And this is little katie. And, 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. And the first the bandits roost photograph and the fivecent lodging was in how the other half lives, his first famous book. And katie was in his second book which came out in 1892 called children of the poor. And in that book, he was more like a social worker caseworker. He actually had discussions with his subject matters where here the lodgers were just surprised by men bursting into the room and taking a photograph. Katie, he talked to katie, he learned her name. He learned her story. She her mother died. She was living with her siblings in a 49th street tenement and he took this picture at the 52nd Street Industrial school 37 and when he said, katie, what do you do . Katie said, i scrubs. So her older siblings were working in a hammock factor during the day, but katie stayed home. She is 9 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 really the turn slightly after the turn of the century. And they put buildings and sort of gave an idea of the density of space and put buildings in perspective. So you see the Lower East Side here where riis was primarily working. And it is astounding sort of how many people are sort of crammed and how many structures are crammed into this space. The u. S. Census bureau at the time said that 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 or largest population, most densely populated city on earth, which may or may not have been the case but thats what he claims in how the other half lives. And i think if you look at this map it really sort of speaks to that density, that crowdedness. Sort of the issues that he was addressing. So we had been talking about the importance of that jacob riis had lived many of the issues that he wrote about later 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. And one of the things that 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 autobiography which he published in 1901. But 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 making of an american, and also his book battle of the slum. And we have featured pages from that in almost all the cases. And here, for biography, we have used the very first one where he talks about his niaivety coming to new york. And back in denmark, had he loved to read american literature. He was quite fluent in english when he came to the United States. But one of his favorite authors was James Fenmore cooper and he had this vision as many scandinavians did that america was the wild west. And he said, we didnt know the difference east and west and here he is. He gets out at Castle Garden and hes in this metropolis of new york, and there are no buffalos. But the very first thing he did was he bought a revolver. So this is, hes making fun of himself. Often he was telling jokes in the lectures. This is a funny story about this green kid getting off the boat and buying a revolver which he strapped to the outside of his coat and hes strutting down broadway and a policeman stops him and says son, maybe youll want to get rid of the gun. So, its a funny story. And, it actually was a very, very hard time for jacob riis when he first came. He had a lot of difficulties making a living, finding work. He was unable to find steady work. He worked a lot of odd jobs. And he got very depressed. And one of the things were showing from the New York Public Library is a wonderful early diary of his thats written partly in danish and then he switches to english but 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 really his suicidal feelings, so it was very difficult in the beginning. And theres 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 up in queens, new york, and have a family. So a lot of jacob riis motivation in life is that everyone should have a healthy, safe and happy family like he does. And he writes a lot about families and the welfare of children in particular. And he often would tell his audiences, theres no difference between these children or yours and mine. Thats the wife elizabeth in the middle and the five children. There were some other children that died young. So next we are going to talk about what looks like a strange assemblage of equipment, things were not used to seeing this days but this is photographic equipment very similar to what riis would have used on his raiding parties that barbara described earlier. Then what we have here is actually a camera which is a detective cram. So this was sort of a stealth camera. It could be used without a tripod. It could be held by the strap on the side. So it gave the photographer some mobility. And the other thing that was an innovation and sort of allowed for a lot of mobility at that time was the invention, 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 is a holder here that we see. And you could carry a few with you. And you could make a number of exposures in a particular outing. And what we have in the back here is a flash pan so riis learns about the german invention of magnesium flash powder in 1887. And hes very interested in it. He understands that he could be using this to great effect for his work. And the first as barbara had said earlier, the first application of the flash powder was put into pistols and you would go in and sort of set it off. There would be a big boom, a big flash of light. Of course, it would scare the people that were being photographed to no end. This flash powder holder was not that much better. And very, very dangerous. But you would put the magnesium flash powder in the pan, probably take a fuse, light the fuse and, again, it would go off in a big whomph. 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 that you would get some image on the dry plate. So theres also the question of, how did riis use his photographs . He made these initial photographs between 1887 and 1892. That was the peak period of his photography. And he really saw himself not as a photographer. He thought he was using photography as a tool for his journalism. We have to remember at the same time he was doing the lectures and showing them as lantern slides, he was also still a Police Reporter. And his intent was that he would use these images to 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 a 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 that would be printed in the newspaper. And the reason for that is that the technology was not there yet to do half tones in the newspapers. They did make rather flat half tones that were in magazines and monthly journals for which riis also wrote as a freelance journalist. But it wasnt really until the 1890s that the quality was good enough that they had good reproduction photographs. At that time it, riis stopped taking photographs and he just purchased photographs that were taken by other people. But his original idea is to appeal visually and combine the image and the word in order to persuade people. Riis was hired to work as a on the beat basically. Reporting crimes and anything that happened through the police department. And for six years he was on night work where his Newspaper Office where he worked for the new york tribune and 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 the Police Headquarters. And hes there with his friend and fellow reporter amos enson, theyre riis is in the corner and enson at the desk. And, he would basically follow the police where they when they would get a call, a murder happened or a crime. And he would write about the stories. But he got a lot of Human Interest stories from this, from this is partly how he got access to the inside of tenement buildings and so on. 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 Sanitation Division when they were doing investigations of the tenements. And he would be with them. So he was a trusted and known face on the street. And so he reported for the newspapers but he also started doing Human Interest stories that focused on the conditions faced by the poor. And theyre the kinds of issues that were showing in the exhibit on the side walls, including housing and public health, public space, labor, immigration. And he wanted to expose how difficult the circumstances were under which the poor were living, especially the immigrant poor. And to encourage people to either give money to charities. There were over 138 charities active at the time that were dealing with indigent and the poor in one way or another or to encourage philanthropists to give a lot of money, to endow things like lodging houses. And, to, also, work with the government to bring about municipal reforms. When riis went on the road, he started off doing his lantern slide lectures in new york city, but eventually had he tours all over the country and appeared in many different cities. And he would travel just with the lantern slides in a box, and every venue would you have to supply the lantern projector. And the operator to operate the lantern slide. He would be paid about 150 to for his services and he traveled across the country. It was astounding. We do have his appointment books that show that he would be in a different city every night practically. And so, this is a very deluxe model but, again, he could have been using this. Its a stereo opticon or a biopticon to allow for one slide to fade in and one slide to fade out. And there are other models that just have one lens. And we have this in the exhibit at the courtesy of the American Magic lantern theater who loaned this artifact just for this exhibit. It was also in the exhibit at the museum of the city of new york. And here in the exhibit we have a video running that is based on the one transcript that we have of riis lecture. Out of the alleys comes the problem of the children. This one came out to the alley just as she is here on the left. Her hair was matted with blood and her whole body was covered with sores. The future of this child. Can you read it in her face . I can. And after she had been in the care of the society for the prevention of cruelty to children, this is the way she looked on the right. In the last 16 years, that society hasty arms around between 50,000 and 60,000 children. What a record of work. And this is the foundling asylum kno