USA HISTORY

Detailed explanation-1: -Jacob Riis was an American newspaper reporter, social reformer, and photographer. With his book How the Other Half Lives (1890), he shocked the conscience of his readers with factual descriptions of slum conditions in New York City.

Detailed explanation-2: -How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York (1890) is an early publication of photojournalism by Jacob Riis, documenting squalid living conditions in New York City slums in the 1880s.

Detailed explanation-3: -Riis (1849–1914) was a journalist and social reformer who publicized the crises in housing, education, and poverty at the height of European immigration to New York City in the late nineteenth century.

Detailed explanation-4: -While working as a police reporter for the New York Tribune, he did a series of exposés on slum conditions on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, which led him to view photography as a way of communicating the need for slum reform to the public.

Detailed explanation-5: -Jacob Riis documented the slums of New York, what he deemed the world of the “other half, ” teeming with immigrants, disease, and abuse. A police reporter and social reformer, Riis became intimately familiar with the perils of tenement living and sought to draw attention to the horrendous conditions.