All while writing this book and compiling the first catalog of riiss photograph. In the years it has taken to get these exhibitions mounted and this book published kb eed bonn worn ever single type of hat in the business and none of this could have been possible without her talent, energy and passion for her subject. With that, i will let bonnie take the stage. [ applause ] jacob rhys. Amy, thank you so much, im moved. Thank you very much. Welcome, everyone. Okay so im going to read pretty much lets see what we have to say here. The jacob im going repeat what amy did to just make sure that we understand how these different parts of this project fit together. The jacob riis exhibition now on view in the Jefferson Building at the library of congress is the result of a collaboration of the past several years between the library and the museum and the city of new york. The museums owns riiss photograph of new york city slums in the late 19th century. These photographs are the earliest evidence of the disastrous effects of the forces of modernity on new york whose slums were the worst on earth at that time. Because the citys economy was expanding so rapidly it became a magnet for rural americans and european immigrants seeking jobs and a better life. Although jobs were plentiful, the city didnt have the housing transportation or sanitation system to meet their needs. New arrivals lived in hastily built tenements with little or no plumbing and wages and rents were exploitative. People including children did piece work in their homes, worked in fact toirs, education was not mandatory and there were no public parks or playgrounds where children could play safely. Riiss photographs taken between 1887 and 1895 depicts these ills. The collection is small, riis took about 250 pictures of new york but its unique, world famous and in constant demand. As a signature image im showing you bandits roost which is riiss most famous picture. It shows some italian toughs in an alley in a neighborhood called mulberry bend which he wrote much about and which is very close to his office. Lets see if i can get this going properly. And just to show you the sort of sense in which riis images have been thoroughly disseminated, this is shows recreation of bandits roost by Martin Scorsese in his 2002 film gangs of new york. Riis is equally celebrated for his first book how the other half lives which presented a passionate argument for addressing this crisis. Riis was a journalist by trade and after years of covering the crime beat in new york he began to write about urban poverty and the latest ideas to remedy it. His book has remained in print since it first appeared in 1890 and has become a landmark text in American History. This shows you the First Edition of the book. Its very small. I dont know, i should know this by now, like 5 x 9 and this shows you a recent edition you can see how its even called out on the cover a jacob riis classic. Interestingly of the t photograph on the front is not by riis. [ laughter ] but its a good picture of tenements. The library of congress owns the bulk of riiss archive which includes notes, manuscripts, off prints of articles, annotated scrapbooks of newspaper clippings, family letters, expense books and much more and to give you some idea, this is the first page of a small scrapbook in which riis collected the press comments on his very first lecture. It read here press comments on the lecture the other half, how it lives and dies in new york illustrated with 100 photographic views by jacob a. Riis delivered for the first time january 25, 1888 before the American Photographers Association at 122 west 36th street new york. So this gives you a sense of how aware he was of keeping track of his careers if posterity. The current exhibition, which opened last fall in new york as amy said and will travel this fall to denmark which is riiss native country brings together the museums photographs and librarys archive for the first time. In each venue the show takes a different form but each offers a rich portrait of riis and his legacy. I first encountered riis photographs in 1987 when i took a job as curator of princeton photographs at the museum of the city of new york. Riis was a professional journalist, not a professional photographer, not even a serious amateur photographer yet he is considered one of the great pioneers in the history of the medium. This is the putz that will has kept me working on riis on an off for i have to say nearly 30 years, just a shocking thought. But now finally i am done. [ laughter ] today i would like to share with you my journey with riis and summarize my understanding of his accomplishments as a reformer and photographer. Before becoming curator at the museum i worked in the photography departments of three art museums. These museums collected individual prints by photographs who used the camera to create works of art. The riis collection was unlike any id ever seen. It consisted of 415 glass negatives, many of them copy negatives of prints by other photographers. 26 Glass Lantern slides made by commercial photography stud yeses and 191 vintage prints and the remainder by unknown professional photographers. The museum was the sole repository of riis photograph which is consisted of this assortment of odd stuff. The record search at the museum indicated the collection came there in 1945, 31 years of riis died and was given by his son Roger William riis. The story behind this gift only created more questions. In the 1940s, photographer alexander alain, sr. , had noticed that the title page of how the other half lives announced that the books illustrations were based on photographs by the author. Searching for these photographs, alain contacted riis son and convinced him to ask the current owners of the house in queens where he grew up if he might look in the attic for his fathers photographs. There he found a box which contained the 450 negatives, 326 slides and 191 vintage prints that now comprise the riis collection. The very fact that riis did not save his photographs is the most important clue to what he thought of them. In contrast to the photographs, riis organized, annotated all of his papers for posterity. His family gave most of them to the library of congress and a smaller portion to the new york public library. When riis sold the family home and moved to massachusetts in 1912 he left the photographs in the attic. The contents of the box in the attic was give on the the museum of the city of new york because alain teamed up with the curator at the time, grace mayer and a together they prepared an exhibition the battle with the slum which, in 1947, introduced riis photographs to the world. The show featured 50 beautiful prints made by alain from riis negatives with quotations called by mayer from riis writings. This comparison of an alain print on the left and the contact print from riis negative negatives the contact print from this negative in the riis collection gives you an idea of elans artistry. Alain doubled the size of riis print which is you cannot see here. But what you can see is get some sense of his dark room wizardry in which alland created rich blacks and detailed highlights he also cropped out the foreground of the image, eliminated the areas out of focus which brought our attention to the rag pickers in the middle distance lets see if i can show you this. Recropped out this out of focus foreground so in his foreground you get a closeup view of these rag pickers that are sitting here among rags against this wall. A huge success, the exhibition was widely covered in the photographic press andris entered the history of photographer as a pioneer of the medium in 1973 alland published a well researched biography which featured his prints and was titled jacob a. Riis, photographer and citizen. Without alland, riis photographs would have been lost but because of him riis became known as a modern documentary photographer, which he was not. In the 1950s as interest in riis photographs grew the museum had to provide access to the collection, most of which was made of glass and could not be shown in original form, to facilitate researchers and provide prints for reproduction museum staff photographers made study prints from the negatives. Like allands prints, these were 8 x 10 enlargements but unlike allands prints they were poor quality. This was the situation when i arrived at the museum in 1987. Because of allands rescue and pro morgs of riis photographs, riis was considered a major modern photographer but because of the museums stewardship, the public saw only poor study prints made from negatives and knew nothing of the additional images available, only aslan tern slides or vintage prints. Okay, sorry, ill go back to that one. To compound the problem, many photographs made by riis were attributed to him because many of the negatives were copies of prints by other photographers he acquired so heres this is where i need this pointer. If you can see, this is a riis has pinned up Jessie Tarbox beals photograph with thumb tacks and rephotographed it. So you can see the thumb tacks here and the reason he did this is because he wanted to have a lantern slide made and im showing you the lann tesh slide on the right for his lectures. This is a scene of a family making artificial flowers in their tenement home. This picture because this is a negative, a copy negative, this was cropped so that you dont see the thumb tacks and printed the same size as all the others so for many, many years this image was attributed to riis even though its actually got Jessie Tarbox beals signature on the negative right down here. So those were the kind of that collection present ed so generally curators have enormous interpretive discretion with collections just by virtue of selecting them and figuring out how to present them. This case, this collection presented me as the curator with a sort of alarming sense of responsibility because by having to essentially put aside these study prints and determine how to create new prints and how to make the Glass Lantern slides available as well as the information in the negatives and the vintage prints i was kind of creating had the responsibility to create riis work. Which was daunting to say the least in 1994 and by this time i was not on staff but i was supervising this project the museum received a grand from the National Endowment for the humanities to create a database of the collection to make color transparencies of the lantern slides and make contact prints, 4 x 5 inches, the same size as the negatives on printing out paper, the type used in riis day. The goal was to create prints that looked like the vintage print wes did have in the collection and thats where this was in the wrong order but ill show you. This is an example of one of the handful of vintage prints in the collection in decent condition. This is a contact print, 4 x 5 inches mounted on a piece of cardboard. So these vintage material prints as they are called are what the public now sees and theres a large sampling of these on view in the current exhibition. That year, 1994, i wrote an article that explained the neh preservation project titled what are the photographs of ji cob riis and it began with a hand colored lantern slide of bandits roost. You can see that here. This image was meant to surprise and provoke the viewer. You think you know bandits roost, look at this. And thats what the slide looks like. So this is the kind of material that was buried because the lantern slides were not available to researchers but this slide is as Company Prime minister of how riis doesnt look anything like a modern documentary photographer. With the new facsimiles as a foundation it was clear that the foundation was not a body of work but the raw material for riis articles and lectures. For him, the final product was words and pictures together. What was needed was a study of the photographs to delineate which pictures he took, when and for what purpose and which pictures he acquired, when and for what purpose. The detective worked consisted of creating a Research Folder for each image and collecting in the folder each version of the image, the negative, any lantern slides and prints along with photo copies of each published version of each image. The illustrations of riis articles, dozens of which appeared in new york daily newspapers and nationally circulating magazines could be gleaned from the off prints and scrapbooks in the riis papers and library of congress. In 1976, the riis papers had been microfilmed and i was able to purchase a copy of the eight rolls of film which became my bible a bible. Any of you who have had reseawo with microfilm know how much fun that is. This forms the basis of the current catalog. In 1997, however, i did not aim to produce a catalog, i aimed to produce a narrative about riis photographic practice and i hope to place the five years in which he used the camera within the context of his 40 years as a journalist. As amy explained, im an art historian not historian and for the latter task i was not equipped. I dont understand riis world which was not that of an artist but of journalism, politics, Law Enforcement and housing at the turn of the century. Doing some preliminary research i learned riis was an important figure in American History regardless of photographs but for his writings and activism. To get my bearings in the history of the period and bridge the dialogue in two disparate fields i needed the help of an historian so i reached out to dan sit rum from Mount Holyoke college. We were awarded a grant to prepare a book on riis which was published in 2007 and came out in paperback in 2014 and thats this book. While we were working on the book, the museum embarked on a massive digitization of its photo collections and the riis collection among others is fully available online. As incredible as this accomplishment is it highlighted a problem. The information that accompanied the digital images online was the preliminary Research Done in 1994 as part of that original neh access and preservation grant. The museum was sending serious researchers to me personally to help them better understand what they encountered online which sent me time and again to my research files. I realized that there was a real need for a complete catalog of the collection that would place riis photographs in the context of his writings and sort out the naughty problems of attribution, to explain which picture he took, which he asked others to take for him and when and why, in 2012 i offered the contents of my files to the museum and asked if it was interested in supporting the publication of the catalog. The museum decided to sponsor the catalog and a primary goal is to contrast riis photographs with the published illustration which is predated the accurate half tones that became standard by the turn of the century, by 1900. This required extensive photography of riis articles and books. That is it required reliance on the jacob riis papers in the library. A dialogue between the two institutions resulted in a partnership to jointly published the catalog. For me this was a good send. After years at peering at smudgy images on microfilm i was able to examine the original scrapbooks and letters. It was as if i finally met the man i studied for so long. As the museum and library worked out an agreement, i began meeting with amy who edited the catalog, barbara bear in the manuscripts and Archives Division and cheryl regan director exhibitions. They not only brought the catalog and exhibition into being but enhanced my understanding of riis and Beverly Brannon also who is a curator in the princeton photographs department helped me with the was invaluable in helping me with the riis photographs that are part of the collection here having told my riis story let me reiterate the story of riis as i have come to understand it. Jacob august riis was born in 1849 in denmark, a cathedral town more connected to the medieval past than the industrial present. Riis was a restless, even rebellious child who at age 20 left home for america, a place about which he knew nothing. In his autobiography he mentioned he loved james fen mortar coopers stories of American Indians and he purchased a gun which he brandished and narrowly escaped getting arrested. His desire to reinvent himself in a new land was a common 19th century story. America was built by waves of european immigrants, irish, germans, chinese, scandinavians, italians and jews. Between 1870 and 1900 a tenth of all danes left home for america. These, by the way, are riis slides in his own autobiographic alek which you are. These slides are in this collection here. Most danish immigrants traveled to the midwest as homesteaders and in many instants they founded their own communities. By contrast, riis spend five years wandering from place to place, job to job, failing to establish a foothold time and again. The immigrants sense of alienation, of being caught between old and new and feeling misunderstood was perhaps extreme in riis case. I explaining why he slept on this gravestone in new brunswick, new jersey, riis wrote the night dews and snakes and dogs that kept sniffing and growling made me tired of sleeping in the fields. The dead were much better company, they minded their own business and let a fellow alone. [ laughter ] who motivated riis to continue was his determination to win the hand of elizabeth gertz, a girl from his hometown who was socially beyond his reach there. Against all odds, she was unmarried when he asked for her hand in 1875, thats after his five years of failure and she accepted despite the fact she barely knew him. He brought elizabeth back to america, they had five children andris settled the family in a house with a large garden in Richmond Hill queens. Riis succeeded in fulfilling every immigrants dream of middleclass respectability and this was perhaps not that distributive but one of the most charming pictures in of his family snapshots he took. His house you can see in the background on this large property that had, thats his daughter katie with her pet goat and you can see riis shadow in the front where hes holding the camera. Riis finally found his way in america as a newspaper man in 1876 he landed a job as a Police Reporter for the new york tribune and later for the evening sun. The daily police beat provided by his base salary for 23 years until 1899. This was the era of yellow journalism in which new yorks mainly daily papers competed for screaming headlines and