>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. ^M00:00:03 ^M00:00:19 >> Guy Lamolinara: Good afternoon, everyone. And thank you for joining us today for our Books and Beyond Program. I'm Guy Lamolinara from the Center for the Book and the Center for the Book is co-sponsoring this talk today. We're the division of the Library that promotes books, reading libraries and literacy, and we also administer here at the Library the Young Readers Center and the Poetry and Literature Center which are over in the Jefferson Building. Our mission is carried out nationwide. We do that here through the National Center, but we also have a State Center in every state and D.C., and we also have one in the U.S. Virgin Islands, and we also have a partnership of 80 like-minded literacy organizations that we work with. Additionally, we play an important role in the National Book Festival and this year's Festival is Saturday, September 24th at the Washington Convention Center. And if you've never been to the National Book Festival, I urge you to come because it's a wonderful event. It's a great way to meet your favorite authors. And you could find out more about the Book Festival at loc.gov/bookfest. Before we get started, I just ask that you please turn off all your electronic devices, and I need to tell you that we're recording today so that, so if you ask a question you will become part of our webcast. And we also have C-SPAN here today, so you'll be part of theirs as well. You can view our webcast at the Center for the Book website which is read.gov, and there you'll find more than 250 book discussions that we've had over many years. Today's author's book will be for sale just outside the entrance to this room, and following her presentation she will be signing the book. And it's also a chance for you to talk to her further about her work. The chief criterion we have for deciding which books we feature in our series is that the writer must have used the Library of Congress, and in this case, of course, that is obvious with our Jacob Riis Collection. This program is presented, in fact, in conjunction with the exhibition created by the Interpretive Programs Office here at the Library. And this is the brochure where you will find out more information about this great exhibition which is over in the Jefferson Building. The exhibition is called Jacob Riis, Revealing How the Other Half Lives, and it's a co-presentation of the Library and Museum of the City of New York. And it's on display in Jefferson Building through September 5, 2016. The exhibition and its programming were made possible by generous donors listed on the back of this exhibition brochure which you can find at the exit to this event. Today's program is co-sponsored with the Interpretive Programs Office, and thank you very much for bringing that program with us today. Also with us is someone from the Publishing Office who has worked on the book, the beautiful book that accompanies the exhibition, and that is Aimee Hess who is a writer/editor in the Publishing Office where she has worked since 2003. Aimee has written two books while there, ^IT Women Who Dare, Helen Keller ^NO and ^IT Women Who Dare, Margaret Mead ^NO. And as an editor, Aimee has worked on scores of books relating to the Library of Congress' vast collections on topics ranging from the Renaissance mapmaking to our collections of photographs documenting Depression-era America. In recent years, Aimee has pioneered the Library's Digital Publishing Program with the 2013 e-books, ^IT Great Photographs from the Library of Congress ^NO and ^IT Michigan-I-O, Allan Lomax in the 1938 Library of Congress Folklife Exhibition ^NO. She is currently editing the forthcoming book, an e-book, ^IT Homeplace ^NO which will highlight the Michael Ford Collection in the American Folklife Center. Please welcome Aimee Hess. ^M00:04:10 [ Applause ] ^M00:04:16 >> Aimee Hess: Okay. Thank you, everybody. I'm here to introduce Bonnie Yochelson with whom I was lucky enough to work on the Jacob Riis book, ^IT Jacob A. Riis, Revealing How the Other Half Lives ^NO. Bonnie is originally from the D.C. area, but she's made her long-time home in New York City. She graduated from Swarthmore College and then proceeded a Master's and a Doctorate in Art History from New York University. Early in her career, she was back in D.C. working in the print room at the National Gallery of Art. And from 1987 to 1991 she was the Curator of Prints and Photographs at the Museum of the City of New York. And that's where she was first able to work with the Jacob Riis collection of photographs. Since leaving the Museum, she's been an independent Curator and Photographic Historian working with such institutions as the New York Historical Society, the Columbia County Historical Society, and the South Street Seaport Museum. And since 1988, she has also taught in the MFA Program in the Department of Photography, Video and Related Media at the School of Visual Arts in New York where she curates the annual Thesis Show, and serves as a mentor to graduating students. In addition to the Thesis Show, Bonnie has curated numerous exhibitions, including Esther Bubley, American Photojournalist, at the UBS Paine Webber Art Gallery in New York in 2001. That also travelled to other cities. And an exhibition titled Alfred Stieglitz New York at the South Street Seaport Museum in 2010. And, of course, she curated our current Jacob A. Riis Exhibition along with Barbara Thayer in our Manuscript Division which opened in a related but different format at the Museum of the City of New York before opening here in April. And it will also travel to two locations in Denmark. Bonnie is also the author of many books including ^IT Berniece Abbott, Changing New York, Alfred Stieglitz New York ^NO, and a co-author with Daniel Czitrom of ^IT Rediscovering Jacob Riis ^NO. She's also written books on the Clarence H. White School of Photography and Esther Bubbly among other subjects. And, of course, Bonnie also wrote the book that we are all here for today, ^IT Jacob A. Riis, Revealing New York's Other Half ^NO. When Bonnie first began working on Riis more than two decades ago, Riis was remembered primarily as a photographer, and her subsequent scholarship has provided a much fuller picture of Riis as an immigrant who pulled himself up by his bootstraps, a journalist, an author, and a social reformer who considered photographs nothing more than a tool to spread his message. By seeing this fuller picture of Riis and by reading his articles, books, lectures, and the personal papers that are housed here at the Library, we can better understand the issues that New York's other half actually faced -- poverty, poor housing conditions, child labor, lack of access to education, homelessness, and disease. Most, if not all of these issues are still with us today in one form or another, which makes Riis's work and Bonnie's more relevant than ever. As an editor, I have worked with a lot of different authors, and since I have the stage I just want to take this opportunity to say what an absolute pleasure it was to work with Bonnie and how much I admire her as a scholar and an independent -- and a museum professional. It takes a certain kind of person to be successful as an independent scholar, someone who can manager her own time, meet deadlines, forge connections and partnerships, and find money to get big projects done. While I was spending much of my time on this one project, she was simultaneously conducting original research, writing unique exhibition lists for different venues, teaching and coordinating the Senior Thesis Show at the School of Visual Arts, all while writing this book and compiling the first-ever catalog of Riis's photographs. In the years it has taken to get these exhibitions mounted and this book published, Bonnie has worn every single type of hat in the business, and none of this could have been possible without her talent, energy, and passion for her subject. So, with that, I will let Bonnie take the stage. ^M00:08:31 [ Applause ] ^M00:08:38 >> Bonnie Yochelson: Aimee, thank you so much. I'm moved. Thank you very much. Welcome everyone. Okay. So I'm going to read pretty much, and let's see what we have to say here. I'm going to repeat a little bit of what Aimee 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 of the Library of Congress is the result of a collaboration of the past several years between the Library and Museum of the City of New York. The Museum's own -- owns the Riis's photographs of New York City's 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 city's economy was expanding so rapidly, it became a magnet for rural Americans and European immigrants seeking jobs and a better life. And although jobs were plentiful, the city did not have the housing, sanitation, or transportation system to meet their basic needs. New arrivals lived in hastily-built tenements with little or no plumbing, and wages and rents were exploitative. People of all ages, including young children, worked in factories and did piecework in their homes. ^M00:10:00 Education was not mandatory and there were no public parks or playgrounds where children could play safely. Riis's photographs, taken between 1887 and 1895, depicted all these urban ills. The collection is small. Riis only took about 250 pictures of New York. But it is unique, world famous, and in constant demand. So just as a kind of signature image, I'm showing you Bandit's Roost which is Riis's most famous picture. It shows some Italian toughs in an alley in a neighborhood called Mulberry Bend which he wrote much about and which was very close to his office. Let's see if I can get this going properly. And just to show you the sort of sense in which Riis's images have been thoroughly disseminated, this is -- shows a recreation of Bandit's Roost by Martin Scorsese in his 2002 film, ^IT Gangs of New York ^NO. Riis is equally celebrated for his first book, ^IT How the Other Half Lives ^NO 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 it's become a landmark text in American history. This is -- shows you the first edition of the book. It's very small. I don't know. I should know this right now, like 5 by 9 inches. And this shows you a recent edition. You can see how it's -- you know, it's even called out on the cover, "A Jacob Riis Classic." Interestingly, a photograph on the front is not by Riis [laughter]. But it's in the picture of tenements. The Library of Congress owns the bulk or Riis's archive which includes notes, manuscripts, off-prints of articles, annotated scrapbooks of newspaper clippings, family letters, expense books, and much more. And just again, 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 reads here, "Press comments on the lecture, "The Other Half, How It Lives and Dies in New York," illustrated with a hundred photographic views by Jacob A. Riis, delivered for the first time, January 25, 1888, before the American Photographers Association at 122 W. 36th Street, New York." So, this gives you a sense of how aware he was of keeping track of his career for posterity. The current exhibition, which opened last fall in New York, as Aimee said, and will travel this fall to Denmark, which is Riis's native country, brings together the Museum's photographs and the Library's archive for the very 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's photographs in 1987 when I took a job as Curator of Prints and Photographs at the Museum of the City of New York. Riis was a professional journalist, not a professional photographer, indeed, not even a serious amateur photographer. Yet he is considered one of the great pioneers in the history of the medium. This is the puzzle that has kept me working on Riis on and off for, I have to say, nearly 30 years. Just a shocking thought. But now, finally, I am done. Today I would like to share with you my journey with Riis and summarize my understanding of his accomplishments as a reformer and a photographer. Before becoming Curator at the Museum I worked in the Photography Departments of three art museums. These museums collected individual prints by photographers who used the camera to create works of art. The Riis collection was unlike any I had ever seen. It consisted of 415 glass negatives, many of them copy negatives of prints by other photographers, 326 glass lantern slides made by commercial photography studios, and 191 vintage prints, a handful from Riis's negatives, and the remainder by unknown professional photographers. The museum was the sole repository of Riis's photographs which consisted of this assortment of odd stuff. The record search at the museum indicated that the collection came there in 1945, 31 years after 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 Alland [assumed spelling], Senior had noticed that the title page of ^IT How the Other Half Lives ^NO announced that the book's illustrations were based on photographs by the author. Searching for these photographs, Alland contacted Riis's 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 father's photographs. There he found a box which contained the 450 negatives, 326 lantern 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 eventually 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 given to the Museum of the City of New York because Alland teamed up with the curator at the time, Grace Mayor, who prepared -- and together they prepared an exhibition, "The Battle of the Slum" which, in 1947 introduced Riis's photographs to the world. The show featured 50 beautiful prints made by Alland from Riis's negatives with quotations culled by Mayor from Riis's writings. This comparison of an Alland print on the left and the contact print from Riis's negatives -- the contact print from this negative in the Riis collection gives you some idea of Alland's artistry. Alland doubled the size of the vintage prints, which you cannot really see here because I'm just fooling around with, you know, reproductions on this -- in the PowerPoint. But which you can see is get some sense of his darkroom wizardry in which Alland created rich blacks and detailed highlights. He also cropped out the foreground of the image, eliminating the areas that were out of focus which brought our attention to the ragpickers in the middle distance. Let's see if I can show you this. He cropped out this basically out-of-focus foreground so that in his foreground you get a closeup view of these ragpickers that are sitting here among rags against this wall, so that it's a much more successful and interesting composition by having cropped the image that way, which is typical of what Alland did. A huge success. The exhibition was widely covered in the photographic press, and Riis entered the history of photograph as a pioneer of the medium. ^M00:17:32 ^M00:17:37 In 1973, Alland published a very well-researched biography which featured his prints from Riis's negatives and was titled ^IT Jacob A. Riis, Photographer and Citizen ^NO. Without Alland, Riis's 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's 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 the Museum staff photographer made study prints from all the negatives. Like Alland's prints, these were eight-by-ten enlargements. But, unlike Alland's prints, they were poor quality. This was the situation when I arrived at the museum in 1987. Because of Alland's rescue and promotion of Riis's photographs, Riis was considered a major modern photographer. But because of the museum's stewardship, the public saw only poor study prints made from the negatives, and they knew nothing of the additional images available only as lantern slides or vintage prints. ^M00:18:45 ^M00:18:55 I'm wondering -- okay. Sorry. I'll 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 that he acquired. So here is -- this is where I need this pointer. If you can see, this is a -- Riis has pinned up Jessie Tarbox Beals photograph with thumbtacks and rephotographed it. So you can see the thumbtacks here, so. And then -- and the reason he did this is because he wanted to have a lantern slide made, and I'm showing you the lantern slide on the right, for his lectures. This is a scene of a family making artificial flowers in their tenement home. And this picture was -- because this is a negative, it's a copy negative, this was cropped so that you don't see the thumbtacks and, you know, printed the same size as all the others. And so for many, many years this image was attributed to Riis even though it's actually got Jessie Tarbox Beals' signature on the negative, right down here [laughter]. ^M00:20:08 So those were the kind of, you know, problems that the collection presented. 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 and the negatives and the vintage prints, I was really kind of creating -- had the responsibility to create Riis's work, which was daunting, to say the least. ^M00:20:58 ^M00:21:06 In 1994, and by this time I was not on staff, but I was supervising this project, the museum received a grant from the National Endowment For the Humanities to create a database of the collection, to make color transparencies of the lantern slides, and to make contact prints, four by five inches, the same size as the negatives, on Printing-Out Paper, the type used in Riis's day. The goal was to create prints that looked like the vintage prints that we did have in the collection and elsewhere. This was in the wrong order, but I'll show you. This is an example of one of the handful of vintage prints that are in the collection that are in decent condition. So this is a contact print, four by five inches, the same size as the negative, mounted on a piece of cardboard. So these vintage material prints, as they are called, are what the public now sees, and there's a large sampling of these on view now in the print exhibition. ^M00:22:00 ^M00:22:04 That year, 1994, I wrote an article that explained the NEH access and preservation project. It was titled, "What Are the Photographs of Jacob Riis?" And it began with a hand-colored lantern slide of Bandit's Roost. You can see that here. This image was meant to surprise and provoke the viewer. You think you know Bandit's Roost? Look at this. And that's 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 an example of how Riis's -- it doesn't look anything like a modern documentary photographer. There's images like this. With the new facsimiles and the database as a foundation, it became clear to me that the collection was not a photographer's body of work, or oeuvre as sometimes called, but the raw material for Riis's articles and lectures. For him, the final product was the 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 work consisted to creating a research folder for each image and collecting in the folder each version of the image -- the negative, any lantern slides, and any prints -- along with photocopies of each published version of each image. The illustrations in Riis's articles, dozens of them which appeared in New York daily newspapers and nationally-circulating magazines could be gleaned from the offprints and scrapbooks in the Riis paper in the 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. And any of you have had any experience with microfilm know how unpleasant an experience that is, but is was vitally important for being able to identify, match up which pictures were taken for which publication. The content of these research folders 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's photographic practice, and I hoped to place the five years in which he used the camera within the context of his 40 years as a journalist. As Aimee explained, I'm an art historian not an historian, and for the latter task I was not equipped. I did not understand Riis's 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 that Riis was an important figure in American history, regardless of the photographs, but for his writings and his activism. To get my bearings in the history of the period and to bridge the dialog in two disparate fields, I needed the help of an historian. So I reached out to Dan Czitrom, a Professor of American History at Mount Holyoke College. As independent scholars, we were awarded an NEH Grant in collaborative research to prepare a book on Riis which was published in 2007, and came out in paperback in 2014. And that's this little book. While Dan and I were working on our book, the museum embarked on a massive digitization of its photo collections and the Riis collection among others is now 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's photographs in the context of his writings and sort out the knotty problems of attribution; that is, 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 a catalog. The museum decided to sponsor the catalog, and a primary goal of the catalog is to contrast Riis's photographs with the published illustrations, which predated the accurate halftones that became standard by the turn of the century, by 1900. This required extensive photography of Riis's articles and books. That is, it required reliance on the Jacob Riis papers here in the library. A dialog between the two institutions resulted in a partnership to jointly publish the catalog. For me this was a godsend. After years of peering at smudgy images on microfilm, I was able to examine the original scrapbooks and letters. It was as if I finally met this man I had studied for so long. As the Museum and Library worked out a formal agreement, I began meeting with Aimee who edited the catalog, Barbara Behr [assumed spelling], Curator in the Museum in the Manuscripts and Archives Division, and Cheryl Regan, Director of Exhibitions. They were invaluable partners who not only brought the catalog and the exhibition into being, but enhanced my understanding of Riis. And Beverly Brannon also, who is a Curator in the Prints and Photograph Department, helped me with the -- was invaluable in helping me with the Riis photographs that are also part of the collection here. Having told my Riis story, let me brief you of the story of Riis as I've come to understand it. Jacob August Riis was born in 1849 in Ribe, 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 that he loved James Fenimore Cooper's stories of American Indians. And when he arrived in New York he purchased a gun which he brandished and narrowly escaped getting arrested. Although Riis's example is perhaps more colorful than most, his desire to reinvent himself in a new land was a common 19th century story. America was built by waves of European immigrants -- Irish, German, Chinese, Scandinavians, Italians, and Jews. Between 1870 and 1900, a tenth of all Danes left home for America. This is one of -- these, by the way, are Riis's slides in his own autobiographical lecture. These are a copy of his slides which are in this collection here. Most Danish immigrants travelled to the Midwest as homesteaders, and in many instances they founded their own communities. By contrast, Riis spent five years wandering from place to place, job to job, failing to establish a foothold time and again. The immigrant sense of alienation, of being caught between old and the new, and feeling misunderstood was perhaps extreme in Riis's case. Explaining why he slept on this gravestone in Brunswick, New Jersey, Riis wrote, "The night dews and the snakes and the dogs that kept sniffing and growling had made me tired of sleeping in the fields. The dead were much better company. They minded their own business and let a fellow alone." What motivated Riis to continue was his determination to win the hand of Elizabeth Gertz, a girl from Ribe, his hometown, who was socially beyond his reach there. Against all odds, she was unmarried when he asked for her hand in 1875. That's after his five years of failure. And she accepted despite the fact that she barely knew him. He brought Elizabeth back to America. They had five children. And Riis settled the family in a house with a large garden in Richmond Hill, Queens. Riis succeeded in fulfilling every immigrant's dream of middle class respectability. And this is perhaps not that descriptive, but one of the most charming pictures of his family snapshots that he took. ^M00:30:00 His house is -- you can see in the background, on this large property they had. That's his daughter, Katie, with her pet goat. And you can see Riis's shadow in the front where he's holding the camera. Riis finally -- okay. Riis finally found his way in America as a newspaper man. In 1876 he landed a job as a police reporter for the ^IT New York Tribune ^NO and later for the ^IT Evening Sun ^NO. The daily police beat provided his base salary for 23 years until 1899. This was the era of yellow journalism in which New York's many daily papers competed for screaming headlines and sensational stories. Riis explained, "The police reporter on a newspaper is the one who gathers and handles all the news that means trouble to someone, the murders, fires, suicides, robberies, and all that sort, before it gets into court." Police reporters shared an office at 301 Mulberry Street, across the street from Police Headquarters in the middle of a six-ward slum. For eight years Riis worked the nightshift and became box reporter through sheer hard work. He also honed his storytelling skills, although his articles often read like tales by Hans Christian Anderson, a fellow Dane. But he insisted they were true fact. "I cannot [inaudible]," he claimed. Next to a clipping in one of his scrapbooks Riis wrote, "This was the last Christmas story I wrote for my paper, ^IT The Evening Sun ^NO. They laughed it to scorn in the office and made no end of fun of it, and yet, of all the stories I have written, I like it best. It moved me more deeply than any of the rest." So, in this picture, which is also in the Library's collection, that's Riis back there, essentially waiting for his from Police Headquarters across the street. And this picture's kind of fascinating because -- and it's on view right now in the exhibit -- because of this wall of photo reproductions from magazines that covers the wall. In 1884, Riis moved from the night to the dayshift. And as he said, "My eggs hatched." He began by covering the meetings of the 1884 Tenement House Commission which convened at Police Headquarters. In this way, Riis learned of the community of philanthropists, engineers, and architects who aimed to change the lives of tenement dwellers. He became a student, an advocate of the latest ideas in housing reform which soon expanded to include education, public parks and playgrounds, public health and immigration policy. In 1887, Riis read about the German invention of flash powder in which a powerful burst of light could illuminate scenes photographed in the dark. He had the idea that he could use photographs to show what his words could only tell. Although he had no intention of photographing himself, and at first he didn't, this was a truly revolutionary idea. About this picture, Five Cents A Spot, Riis wrote, "I recall a midnight expedition to the Mulberry Bend with the Sanitary Police that had turned up a couple of characteristic cases of overcrowding. In one instance, two rooms that should, at most, have held four or five sleepers were found to contain 15, a week-old baby among them. Most of them were lodgers and slept there for five cents a spot. There was no pretense of beds. When the report was submitted to the Health Board the next day, it did not make much of an impression. These things rarely do, put in mere words, until my negatives, still dripping from the darkroom, came to reinforce them. From them there was no appeal." ^M00:33:33 ^M00:33:37 Riis first showed his photographs in January, 1888, at the monthly meeting of the Lantern Slide Committee of the Society of Amateur Photographers of New York. The meeting was arranged by two society members who were interested in the new flashlight photography and had helped Riis take his first photographs. Titling his talk, How the Other Half Lives and Dies in New York, Riis showed 100 slides, spoke for two hours, and invited his friends from the press. The extensive press coverage led to his delivering his lecture to various church groups. In the following year he was asked by two editors of ^IT Scribner's Magazine ^NO to write an article for this prestigious illustrated journal that circulated nationally. In 1890, ^IT Scribner's ^NO published a book-length version, ^IT How the Other Half Lives ^NO which became a national best-seller. This book was what Riis is most known for, and is often considered the beginning of modern photojournalism. However, the book is in many ways unmodern, or at least modern in ways we no longer relate to. ^M00:34:30 ^M00:34:34 The revolutionary flashlight photographs such as Five Cents A Spot remain disturbing, even today. However, they have been rightly criticized for portraying the city's homeless as hapless victims who were photographed without their permission. Indeed, Riis gave them a good scare. He burst into the room with what he called a raiding party -- two photographers, a Sanitary Policeman, and himself -- and set off an explosion. On several occasions the combustible flash powder caused a fire. During Riis's lifetime, the only times his photographs were seen as photographs were in his lectures, like this, projected on a wall, when they were projected on a screen or wall for a live audience. In his article and books on the other hand, they were most often copied as wood engravings. This explains why the photographs were almost never mentioned in the dozen of reviews of Five Cents A Spot. ^M00:35:23 ^M00:35:28 And this shows Five Cents a Spot in the wood engravings that has appeared in the book. ^M00:35:31 ^M00:35:37 For a century after it was written, ^IT How the Other Half Lives ^NO was praised as a call to conscience. But in the 1990s many critics began to fault Riis for relying on racial stereotypes. And this is a picture of an opium den in Chinatown. Indeed, the book is organized as a slum tour in which Riis leads his audience through neighborhoods of Italians, Jews, Chinese, et cetera. In his day, the slum tour was an established literary tradition which grew out of actual guided tours of New York's neighborhoods, rich and poor. Matthew Hale Smith's ^IT Sunshine and Shadow of New York ^NO written in 1869, a generation before, is a classic of the genre. And you can see here, this shows -- the sunshine is the picture of a wealthy -- of a huge mansion on Fifth Avenue, and the shadow shows a slum. This actually looks like Five Points. Yeah, it would have been Five Points, which was the most famous New York slum of the time. ^M00:36:33 ^M00:36:38 Riis's book married the voyeuristic slum tour with a Christian sermon. ^IT How the Other Half Lives ^NO starts and ends with passages from the parable, "A Poem" by James Russell Lowell, in which Christ chastises men of [inaudible] for ignoring their less fortunate brethren. The book ends with Lowell's question, "Think ye that building shall endure which shelters the noble and crushes the poor?" It was Riis's genius to walk the tightrope between popular entertainment and moral uplift. For a 21st century reader, the book is a relic of Victorian sensibility. Most discussions of Riis do not go beyond ^IT How the Other Half Lives ^NO. But the book, which was published in 1890, when Riis was 41 years old, marks only the beginning of his reform work. His later career, which is less known, sheds light on other features of modernity. ^M00:37:27 ^M00:37:31 After the success of his first book, Riis immediately got to work on a sequel, ^IT The Children of the Poor ^NO, which was first published in ^IT Scribner's Magazine ^NO and then as a full-length book in 1892. And this shows the opening page. The picture on the left is unrelated. It's for another article. But this shows you the first page of ^IT The Children of the Poor ^NO in ^IT Scribner's ^NO, and features very worked-over halftone. Again, this is this transitional moment in reproductive technology, of Little Katie, who I'm going to introduce you to in a moment. Perhaps because his subjects were children or because he grew more comfortable with the camera, Riis changed his approach to photographing. Typical of the photographs in ^IT Children of the Poor ^NO is Little Katie whose picture in a heavily reworked halftone opens the ^It Scribner's ^NO article. Katie was a nine-year-old who Riis met on a visit to the West 52nd Street Industrial School founded by the Children's Aid Society to provide classes for children who did not attend public school. Unlike the raiding party of the earlier flashlight photographs, Riis introduced himself to Katie and interviewed her. He learned that when her mother died her father took a new wife and she and her older siblings moved out. Katie kept house for them while they worked in factories. "About Katie," Riis remarked, "this picture shows what a sober, patient, sturdy, little thing she was with that dull life wearing on her day-by-day. She got right up when asked and stood for her picture without a question and without a smile. 'What kind of work do you do,' I asked, thinking to interest her while I made ready. 'I scrub,' she replied promptly. And her look guaranteed that what she scrubbed came out clean." This new approach, in which the photographer shows respect for his subject and gives her a voice, is more in line with current values and representational practices. The book, which combined these word and image portraits with Board of Health statistics and a survey of charity programs, was a commercial failure. ^M00:39:29 ^M00:39:34 Between 1891 and 1893, Riis used the camera regularly as an extension of his writing. While preparing ^IT The Children of the Poor ^NO he also took a series of photographs of three news -- for three newspaper exposes dealing with threats to public health. He photographed 11 Riverside dumps to show that the law banning ragpickers from living in the dumps went unenforced. He went upstate to the Croton Reservoir, the source of New York's water supply, to document industrial and agricultural pollution. ^M00:40:03 And he photographed the abysmal conditions of nine police station lodging houses, the only municipal shelters available to the homeless. This was investigative journalism in the modern sense. But Riis was too far ahead of his time. And this is one of the photographs of the lodging houses that he took in 1892. ^M00:40:22 ^M00:40:27 This is the ^IT New York Tribune ^NO from January, 1892, an article about these lodging houses. The reproductive technology of the time kept his photographs from being seen at full strength. Newspapers made single-line wood engravings after the photographs, which did not look like photographs at all. So just -- that's the way the picture was seen. Because of an outbreak of typhus in the lodging houses, Riis gave a lantern slide lecture at the Academy of Medicine in 1893. Other than this one lecture, the public never saw these photographs. Perhaps for this reason Riis gave up newspaper photography in 1893 and used the camera only occasionally thereafter. Riis's life took a new turn in 1895 when a good government mayor, William L. Strong, defeated the Tammany Hall political machine and Strong appointed Theodore Roosevelt as his Police Commissioner. Having read how the other half lived, Roosevelt walked across the street from Police Headquarters to Riis's Mulberry Street office to seek his advice. The two men became very close friends, and for a short but significant period Riis had access to political power. Thanks to Riis's advocacy, mostly behind the scenes, the worst of the old tenements, the infamous Gotham Court and the Mott Street Barracks, and this is a picture taken on the roof of the Mott Street Barracks where families are basically escaping the heat of the interior for the roof. These big horrible barracks, Gotham Court and Mott Street, were demolished. The police lodging houses were closed. And the notorious Mulberry Bend was condemned to construct a small park. This is Riis's photograph of Mulberry Bend. It actually shows the bend in the street, which is still -- it's still a street of tenements. You can still see it. And this is the park that replaced it. This is a photograph from 1901, not by Riis. What I mean by saying it's still there is that the park is on -- this is trying, this is trying to -- this row is still there. ^M00:42:43 ^M00:42:49 Riis also convinces city to condemn buildings on the Lower East Side to build two more small parks, Hamilton Fish Park and Seward Park which continue to serve local residents today. By the end of the Strong Administration, which was only one term of two years, before Tammany was elected back in, Riis began to take a retrospective view of his decade of reform. In 1900 he published a book called ^IT The Ten Years' War ^NO. That's 1890 when his first book was published in 1900. And 1902 a follow-up which is essentially the same book with more illustrations called ^IT The Battle of the Slum ^NO. Also by 1900 the photographic halftone in which the tonal value of photographs could be economically reproduced with text on the same page was nearly universal in magazines and books. As a result, there was an increased demand for photographs of all sorts, including photographs Riis needed for his new books. Professionals filled the new demand and Riis, rather than taking new photographs, began to collect them. Half of his collection consists of photographs of new schools, model tenements, public parks, et cetera, by professional photographers. ^M00:43:58 ^M00:44:04 In this typical example, Riis wrote an article for ^IT Garden Magazine ^NO about the Jacob Riis Settlement House, a Social Service Organization on Henry Street on the Lower East Side, which he helped found in the 1880s, and which was named for him in 1901. It moved to Long Island City in 1951 and still provides essential services for the community there. The magazine sent a professional photographer to take these pictures for the article. And Riis had lantern slides made from them for his lecture. So these are lantern slides in the collection made from the photographs of this article. ^M00:44:40 ^M00:44:44 Yeah, I think I just showed you the ones. When Riis quit his newspaper job in 1899, he began to spend several months a year travelling all over the country delivering illustrated lectures to fill in for lost income. Lecture bureaus arranged scheduling and billing for this popular form of educational entertainment. For each of his books, Riis developed a slide lecture and travelled the country, very like today's book tours or a Ted Talk. So this is actually a lantern slide, but it was basically a photograph of a poster for his lecture, "The Battle of the Slum, Illustrated by scores of original stereopticon pictures of New York City life," is what the title says. ^M00:45:27 ^M00:45:35 Oh boy. That is terrible [laughter]. It's actually -- it's from a microfilm, but I'll just tell you about it. Riis -- I don't have the original because it's -- well, it's in the collection. It wasn't microfilmed at all. This is from a microfilm from another -- from Chicago Library. Because it was so big, it was just in shreds, and sadly not copied here. But, anyway. Riis's use of the mass media, including lecture circuit, made Riis the nation's face and voice of urban reform. So here's a great story about this image. ^IT The Chicago Tribune ^NO, for example, ran a series of seven full-page articles, "The Story of the Slum," which in -- seven weeks in a row, the entire first page of their editorial section. And so this is the first one, and it's called "The Story of the Slum, Part One." And it shows some of Riis's pictures and his portrait, all in wood engravings after his -- after the photographs. So for this Riis was paid $1000 which was about $29,000 today. So it gives you some sense of his national reputation. Let's get rid of that terrible picture. In 1901, Riis published his autobiography, ^IT The Making of an American ^NO, a confessional test built around two characters, his wife, Elizabeth, and his friend, Teddy Roosevelt. The book was published on Riis's 25th wedding anniversary and just months after Roosevelt became President, a stroke of fate due to the assassination of President William McKinley. The story of a poor young foreigner who became a happily married father of five and a visitor to the White House proved irresistible to the public. Riis published a dozen books, but only two, ^IT How The Other Half Lives ^NO, the slum tour and Christian sermon combined ^NO, and ^IT The Making of an American ^NO, the sort of confessional story of rise from poverty to the White House, were best-sellers. And this is a silver wedding anniversary photograph of Riis and his wife actually taken by a well-known portrait photographer, Gertrude [inaudible]. Riis's autobiography -- let me see. I'm sorry. So. And here is a copy -- a cover of the first edition of ^IT The Making of an American ^NO. Riis's autobiography has been compared to Horatio Alger's contemporaneous rags-to-riches stories and to the American dream, a term not coined though until the Depression. The book also bears comparison to our own confessional culture. Indeed, Riis was mocked in the press for telling all he knows and feels, which makes you feel sorry for him. And his children were teased, he explains, that their father was a bum once people knew the story. ^M00:48:26 ^M00:48:31 Riis no longer -- no doubt enjoyed his fame, but he used his candor to further his cause, not unlike today's celebrities who reveal their histories of sexual abuse or addiction to encourage public understanding of challenging issues. This amusing caricature of Riis pounding on a lectern appeared with a review of his lecture in the San Jose, California ^IT Mercury ^NO in 1911. The reporter noted, "Simple as the story was told, it held the listeners rapt. 'If,' said Riis in closing, 'the story of one plain immigrant lad helps you to look with kind eyes on one little unfortunate lad, I shall think my words well-spoken.'" ^M00:49:12 ^M00:49:17 So, that's my view of -- my summary of his career and how the photographs enter in. So this is the current book, the catalogue. And so, to conclude, let me just say a few words about the catalogue. In the 1990s, when I was working with Dan Czitrom on our book, I felt that a complete catalogue of the Riis collection would send the wrong message. A complete catalogue or, as art historians call it, a catalogue raisonne, identifies and describes the complete works of an artist. I was concerned that a book of this sort would reinforce the incorrect notion, current at the time, that Riis was a photographic artist. Indeed, I had just finished a complete catalogue of another major collection belonging to the Museum of the City of New York, "Bernice Abbott's Changing New York." ^M00:50:06 Unlike Riis, Abbott was a professional photographer and an avant-garde artist who created one of the great artworks of body support of the 20th century. Photographing New York for 10 years, from 1929 to 1939, she defined changing New York by making 305 signed exhibition prints which she presented to the museum, who was the project's sponsor. This kind of artistic intent is exactly what Riis lacked. But over time, the need for a complete catalogue became clear. As I mentioned earlier, scholars need to know the who, when, why story behind each photograph. The book provides a basis for further research in a variety of fields, especially history and media studies. ^M00:50:49 ^M00:50:54 Take Bandit's Roost for example. This most famous of Riis's photographs was not taken by him. It was taken for him in 1887 by the two amateurs who arranged his first talk at the Society of Amateur Photographers of New York. And it was made with a stereoscopic camera which had two lenses mounted side-by-side to produce two images on a glass negative. At some point this negative was divided in half, and that's why you see the two images separated here. And they differ slightly because the lens on the left shows you more information on the left. There's a mother and two little children here on the left. And on the right you have more information featuring this tough Italian dude with a bowler hat. ^M00:51:46 ^M00:51:50 Riis's four lantern slides of Bandit's Roost were made from the right side, featuring the young tough which better illustrated his point about the dangerousness of the back alleys of Mulberry Bend. This kind of close visual reading is essential for scholars seeking to understand Riis as a photographer. The catalogue also serves, though, the interests of the general reader. Riis was wrong that his photographs were of no value when seen apart from his arguments. But they are of much greater value when paired with them. Oh, sorry. That's a stereoscopic camera, so you understand what I mean about the two lenses. "Five Cents A Spot" is much more moving when we learn from Riis that 15 people, including a week-old baby, were sleeping in that illegal lodging house. ^M00:52:35 ^M00:52:39 And when we learned that Little Katie was nine years old, that her mother had died, and her father had abandoned his children, and that she kept house for her siblings, the photograph becomes much more meaningful. By studying each of Riis's photographs and pairing it with his words, the catalogue brings us closer to the empathetic experience that Riis sought to inspire in his audiences more than a century ago. Thank you very much. ^M00:53:03 [ Applause ] ^M00:53:11 I think -- >> Guy Lamolinara: There's time for questions. >> Bonnie Yochelson: You have a few questions? If anybody has any. Could we turn some lights on because I can't see anyone? Yes. >> What edition of ^IT How The Other Half Lives ^NO has the best photographs? >> Bonnie Yochelson: That is a very good and complicated questions. It depends what you mean by the best. ^M00:53:30 ^M00:53:36 You know, I'm -- there've been -- there are so -- when you go on Amazon, and look at ^IT How The Other Half Lives ^NO, there are so many editions. The Museum has only been giving out these vintage material prints of late. But, honestly, I think the best -- well, before you said, which has the best photographs, if you had just said which is the best edition, I would say the one that copies the original book, that shows the wood engravings and the lantern slides, because then you -- it puts the book in context. There was, in the '70s, an edition photographed with 100 -- an edition of the book photographed -- cheap, but large reproductions by Dover Press. You know, very inexpensive, very accessible edition. That has 100 pictures in it. They're just chosen arbitrarily by an editor, but it shows you a lot of pictures. There have been -- but I would say there have been other editions that have tried to use the modern prints with the book, but they kind of destroy the book as an entity by interjecting the modern photographs with the story. So I don't have -- I sort of don't like those books, and I haven't really -- sorry, I've never really thought about how to answer your question. It's the facsimiles of the original that strike me as the best way to look at the books. And all the pictures are available on the Internet, on the Museum's website, so that if there's any image that you're interested in, you could see a beautiful, you know, high-res scan of it on the Museum's website of any individual picture. Yes. >> Let me ask you. You said that -- I'll just start at the beginning. [Inaudible] was just using [inaudible] what you were saying. But afterwards you kind of started to, I suppose, [inaudible] there may be one [inaudible]. Was he ever -- did he ever talk about photographers at that time that influenced him, or did he ever show any interest in that, or was it just that, you know, he needed [inaudible] his pocket? >> Bonnie Yochelson: He wasn't interested -- he didn't think about authorship at all. I mean, he was not interested in making pictures. You know, his pictures were represented however a publisher wanted to show them, you know. So he would give them a print, one of those prints like the vintage print I showed you mounted on board, and then they would have an artist interpret it however that magazine wanted to use it. So he was never interested in the follow-up in that regard. When he had those lantern slides made, and he wanted those sometime colored, it would have more impact, they were colored by -- he never worked in a darkroom. He used the camera. Then he went -- he took his pictures to a commercial studio. They made prints that he would then give to his publishers. They made his lantern slides. I want a lantern slide of this or that. Make this hand-colored or that. He just didn't have a modern sensibility about photography at all, so -- and he only used the camera for five years. I mean, he was -- this is a guy who wrote dozens and dozens of articles, 13 books, was a really skillful writer. And, you know, the cameras were -- the images were critical because of the lectures. I mean, they were absolutely critical. They're really not critical in his books. And they're almost not commented on by reviewers. But the lectures were -- he was really aiming at those lectures. And as I say, as soon as he could get the photographs he needed, and by that I mean -- I have no idea who the photographers are. You know, there were two by Jessie Tarbox Beals who's quite well-known, and seven in 1911 that he acquired of Lewis Hine from the National Child Labor Committee that appeared in one article in ^IT Scribner's ^NO in 1911, which was a summary of the social reform in the country. But other than that, there are just, you know, pictures that were clearly like a public school's that were commissioned by the Board of Ed or, you know, things like that. I mean, so he wasn't really collecting -- there's no indication that he was collecting photographs with an eye to the images, just to the subjects. Yes. >> How do you graphically diverse for his lectures? Did he [inaudible] to give lectures? >> Bonnie Yochelson: No. He travelled the country. There were these -- he travelled -- he started out locally because that was, you know, he was just -- whatever could come up he actually -- there was a mission on the Bowery that actually helped him book his earliest lectures. It was -- this mission actually lent him money to have his first group of slides made. And then they actually publicized his lectures in the area, in the New York area. And the scrapbook shows his going to Connecticut, he's going to New Jersey, sometimes to Pennsylvania, and, you know, very locally. But later, when he really started lecturing his way to make money, that's when he took these national tours, and he spent three or four months on the road. And they'd be booked by these lecture bureaus that -- and he travelled everywhere. And one of the nice things in the exhibition are the postcards that he sent home to his daughter Katie that are from the Grand Canyon, from the South, from the North, from the Northwest. You know, he travelled everywhere. And it's really extraordinary to think about because this is the -- you know, this couldn't have happened without the lantern slide and it couldn't have happened without the train. And one of the objects in the exhibition that belongs to the Museum of the City of New York that's here on view is his lantern slide box. It's just a cardboard box covered in canvas. And it's really, really worn, you know. So he carried that box of slides with him on the train, all over the country several months a year. And he had a heart condition. He had a pretty serious heart attack when he was 60, and he was told to slow down, and he didn't. And he continued, and he was constantly going on tours at a sanitarium in -- I want to say Michigan. I'm -- Barbara, you probably know better than I do. I can't remember. ^M01:00:00 But, anyway. So he was constantly having to be -- having a forced rest. But he ended up dying of a weak heart at 65. So he never stopped. But it was really just that -- he did travel to Europe several times, but his travelling to Europe was more to see his family in Denmark. And then he actually wrote a tremendous amount about Denmark. He wrote this crazy article about Hamlet and Elsinore and sort of saying because there were all these -- because, you know, it's like the truth about Shakespeare in Elsinore, and he actually went and found the documents in the local -- it's a crazy story. He found the documents in the local like City Hall that showed when Shakespeare actually visited Elsinore in Denmark and then wrote this article about it. And he has a photograph there, which he didn't take, of Shakespeare's tomb in Elsinore which he says this is a total fake. It's there just for the tourists. You know. So, I mean, he -- his travel in Europe was more like related to his Danish identity, although he was very involved with English -- with English -- the English were very progressive in terms of social reform, and he sometimes mentions efforts that were done there. So he made an effort to be. But, as far as I know, he didn't give talks there. Yes. >> In your talking [inaudible] on [inaudible] of documenting poverty in the slums [inaudible]? >> Bonnie Yochelson: Sure. Let's see, how do I do this? I mean, Riis took a real hit in the 1890 -- in the 1990s, in the moment of a sort of large attack on the total humanist tradition of documentary photography saying that photographers were essentially making their own reputations on the backs of the poor. So, you know, Dorothea Lang, Eugene Smith, a lot of these very famous photographers were slammed hard, and people turned to Riis as like the beginning of that criticism, of the beginning of the tradition that led to those photographers. And, of course, the slum tour. I mean, the name of his book, ^IT How The Other Half Lives ^NO. I mean, talk about the other, you know. I mean, he's identifying from the get-go, I am on one side describing the poor to, you know, describing the other half to the well-off half. I mean, that is the way he frames that book. And so the book was heavily criticized for that, as well as the racial stereotyping. What I found was that -- sort of what my discovery was, all of that is true, you know, about that first book. And that -- but then there is that interesting shift in the use of the camera with, you know, immediately, you know, in 1891 when he starts photographing for ^IT Children of The Poor ^NO he has a completely different relationship and, as I say, a relationship with his viewers that's very personal and that's in line with his writing which is, in general, the storytelling. He abandons the slum tour entirely after ^IT How The Other Half Lives ^NO. And, as I say, the second book, which is more sort of Marley sound in certain ways was a complete flop as a book. So, you know, people were not interested in really learning about the sentimental story of Little Katie or, you know, Little Eddie, the peddler, or, you know, or a Buffalo who, you know, was a shoeshine boy. These wonderful tales and their portraits fill that book. And that didn't catch on with the general public. And people actually liked the slum tour. They wanted that sort of peek-a-boo of the other half. But that's what's wo interesting about his -- the second best-seller because that is really a contemporary view. When she tells his own story, his own tell-all. I was a homeless, I was a homeless immigrant. I got thrown out of a police lodging house. That is so interesting. It's not really about the photography anymore. But in terms of approach to the subject of poverty, that's something that is very much in line with more contemporary ideas of, you know, of people representing themselves. And I -- as opposed to having other speak for them or others represent them. And that is so interesting. I find that really fascinating. It's no longer really about photography. It's just about self-representation and how to affect people, how to get people moved to care about the problems of the poor. And it may be, and this is like totally armchair psychology on my part, but, you know, by the time he wrote that book he was famous. By the time he wrote that book he was friends with Teddy Roosevelt in the White House. And only from that position of security was he willing to tell that story. When he wrote ^IT How The Other Half Lives ^NO, his social status was much less clear and much less secure. And so by his identifying himself in that earlier book as, well, I'm one of you, he doesn't tell the tale that he stayed in a lodging house in that, you know -- and that he was thrown out on the street in a lodging house. He didn't tell that story in ^IT How The Other Half Lives ^NO. Rather, he says, oh, let me tell you about the Chinese, let me tell you about the Jews, let me tell you about the Bohemians, as a newspaper man, as someone who knows this world through my work, not through my own experience. So that's the kind of shifts that I see that are really important. And, again, though, again and again, I mean, when I give talks on the [inaudible] show in New York, there was already somebody saying, well, wasn't he like a bad guy, you know? Aren't these photographs really unethical, you know? And all I can say is yes. But what he's -- a more, a more in-depth study shows that his, you know, his ideas about reform and representation changed over time. >> Guy Lamolinara: Wrap it up. Thank you. ^M01:06:14 [ Applause ] ^M01:06:18 >> Bonnie Yochelson: Thank you. Thank you, Aimee. >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov. ^E01:06:26