Now refer to institutionally as the press. Lectures in history on American History tv on cspan3 every saturday at 8 00 p. M. Eastern. Lectures in history is also available as a podcast. Find it where you listen to podcasts. Youre looking at a timelapse video recorded by the library of congress showing the process of constructing the exhibition jacob riis revealing how the other half lives. Next on American History tvs american artifacts, we visit the exhibit in the librarys Thomas Jefferson building to learn about the life of the danishborn journalist, social reformer, and photographer. This program is just under an hour. Im cheryl regan, exhibit director in the Interpretive Programs Office at the library of congress. Im barbara baier, curator, of this exhibit and im the historian in the Manuscript Division of the library of congress. 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, the jacob riis papers, have been married with the photographs that are stellar collection at the museum of the city of new york. And we pick 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 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 and sort of concentrating more on his biography, more on his photography. Here were looking at riis as the journalist because thats the strength of our collection. The papers here, which number 3,000 in the Manuscript Division, are really featured well in this exhibition and sort of come to the forefront. We also really wanted to emphasize the combination of the photographs and the manuscripts in terms of jacob riis career. As a photo journalist. Often people think of him as a writer or photographer and were really emphasizing the combination of those two things and his role as a communicator. We have organized the exhibit by the different ways that and the different mediums that riis used as a Police Reporter, as a writer, as 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. And hes really a creature of the gilded age. He comes into real celebrity in the 1890s and the early 1900s, so hes kind of on that cusp between older models of poverty from the gilded age and the late victorian period and then the new progressive era, more governmental kinds of policies and solutions. So, he had a foot in both worlds and thats another one of our major points in the exhibit. Jacob riis was born in 1849 in reba, denmark, and 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 student, although he loved to read and he played hooky a lot and later when he was in new york he had a lot of sympathy for truant young boys. And some of his articles are about truancy and how we can address that as an issue to get kids in school and he spoke from personal experience. And 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, and he had a very hard time initially here finding work. He did all kinds of odd jobs. Worked as a laborer, a door to door salesman, sometimes homeless, was sometimes sleeping at nights in homeless shelters and the police lodging houses. And 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. My names bonnie yochelson. And i wrote the complete collection catalog of riiss photographs that was published on the occasion of this exhibition. And my engagement with the collection started in the 1980s when i was curator of princeton photographs at the museum of city of new york which owns riis new york photographs. Theres a great paradox to riis photographs which is that he was a journalist and he was a celebrity and 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 didnt even think they were of any value apart from his words, apart from his arguments and his articles and his publications. And the way they were discovered is a really fascinating story. There was a photographer riis died in 1914. 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 of new york, so its kind of an iconic image. When he first used photographs to illustrate the slums, that was in 1887, he reached out to a friend who was a photographer and he found two photographers who wanted 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. So, he worked with these 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. Its, again, 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 just 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 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. 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 american, which was his 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 schlup. And we have feature pages from that in almost all the cases. And here, for biography, we have used the very first one where he talks about his naivete coming to new york. And back in denmark 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, and what allowed for a lot of mobility at the time was the 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 illumin