Classic Books Library presents this brand new edition of "How the Other
Half Lives" (1890) by Jacob Riis. This powerful collection of
photographs depicts the slums of New York during the 1800s. As an
émigré, Riis witnessed the poverty and crowded conditions of the city,
and turned to photojournalism to document street life. Mastering the
innovative use of flash, and being one of the first to use the
technology in photographic practice in America, Riis produced starkly
honest and evocative images of the tenements. Riis (1849-1914) was a
journalist and social documentary photographer born in Denmark. He
emigrated to New York as a young man and became part of a large wave of
immigrants that settled there in the late 1800s. After initially
training as a carpenter, his journalistic career began when he was
appointed as a trainee at the New York News Association. Later, Riis
developed an interest in photography as a way to further illustrate the
conditions of city slums that featured in his reports, and his first
collaborative photojournalism work was published in 1888.