Down and dirty

HOVERING on the margins between high-school history-textbook glory and the ever-expanding empire of American amnesia, Jacob Riis still tantalizes us with his evocative do-gooder example. The Danish-born Riis (1849-1914) immigrated in 1870 to America, leading a hand-to-mouth existence in the first few years and sometimes sleeping on the streets, before finding himself as a journalist.

As a police reporter for the New York Tribune, he learned the seedy side of urban life, exposing the pollution of the city’s water supply and championing small parks and playgrounds. He wrote a campaign biography of Theodore Roosevelt, who called him “the best American I ever knew.” Indeed, Riis’ 1901 autobiography, “The Making of an American,” was a bestseller, an exemplar of immigrants entering the melting pot and becoming useful citizens. But he is best known today as a pioneering muckraker for his hair-raising account of tenement poverty, “How the Other Half Lives”(1890), and the stunning photographs he took to illustrate those overcrowded conditions. He is also credited with inspiring the passage of legislation banning the suffocating “dumbbell” air-shaft design and promoting livable housing for the poor.

There are several admiring biographies and an exquisite volume, “Jacob A. Riis: Photographer and Citizen,” by Alexander Alland Sr., who helped find Riis’ negatives in the 1940s, reprinting them in magnificent style so later generations could appreciate them. Now we have a new study, by historian Daniel Czitrom and photography scholar Bonnie Yochelson, whose aim is to “rediscover Jacob Riis” and rescue him from detractors and admirers alike; in essence, they want to take him down a peg -- in keeping with the tendency of the revisionist historical school to downgrade Establishment-recognized heroes and celebrate forgotten progressive activists and the laboring masses as our unsung protagonists. They set out their shared viewpoint in the introduction: “A deeply contradictory figure, Riis was a conservative activist and a skillful entertainer who presented controversial ideas in a compelling but ultimately comforting manner.” In other words, he was insufficiently radical for their taste. He shied away from rowdy working-class entertainments, his politics were Republican, he was a devout Methodist and his muckraking sought to enlist Christian conscience rather than government intervention. And he used ethnic humor and dialect jokes in his lectures -- then a common practice, but one that presumably tarnishes his humanitarian credentials in retrospect.

Czitrom, a distinguished historian of old New York and a fine writer, does an excellent job of situating Riis in the larger context of tenement housing reform, a movement that had begun long before Riis arrived and had frustrated many noble reformers. He may be right in upbraiding Riis for not crediting his predecessors, but the reasons he assigns seem excessively ideological. Thus, he claims: “Riis went to great pains to erase the more radical forces in city politics from the story.” But “How the Other Half Lives” was meant as a vividly personal, high-journalistic account of slum life, not as a historical account of prior reform efforts.

Likewise, writing of an earlier reformer, Charles F. Wingate, Czitrom notes: “If Wingate’s journalism provided a template for Riis, why did his influence remain unacknowledged? The answer may lie in Wingate’s turn toward political activism, specifically his . . . affiliation with the organized labor movement, from which Riis always kept his distance.” Again, this seems too conspiratorial; Riis made his experience into a personal myth of loneliness and redemption. As for the historical neglect of Wingate, most good deeds are forgotten regardless of whether or not the doer has pledged allegiance to organized labor. Overall, though, he is scrupulous in balancing Riis’ idealistic and opportunistic tendencies. He links Riis’ tours of the downtrodden with the “sunshine and shadow” guidebooks of late 19th century New York and the sermon tradition of the day, concluding judiciously: “The contradictions inherent in Riis’s work -- its simultaneously reactionary and forward-looking stances, its derivative and synthetic qualities, its mixture of urban entertainment and social inquiry -- are certainly more evident today. . . . None of this ought to detract from his breakthroughs. Riis was the first muckraker and the first American social documentary photographer. Art historians will continue debating the quality, intentionality, and meaning of his pictures. But a century later they remain a powerful and unique record. . . .”

Yochelson, in an essay on the photographs, is regrettably less responsive to their worth than her co-author. She rightly points out that in trying to establish photography as an art form, “art photographers sought models . . . to justify their own aesthetic claims. . . . [T]he older photographers’ intentions were reinterpreted to fit the aesthetic needs of their disciples.” She is arguing that one can’t cite Riis as an important influence on Lewis Hine, Dorothea Lange and other social photographers because his work had all but vanished until it was unearthed in the 1940s. Fair enough. But she dismisses any artistic intentionality in his work by stressing his modest disclaimers about not being much of a photographer and noting that he took most of his pictures in a five-year period and only to illustrate his lantern-slide lectures.

Riis’ images of sweatshops, alleys, “street arabs” (homeless children), police-station lodging rooms and tenement life remain unforgettably moving and display an uncanny connection of human beings to their environments not seen again until August Sander’s masterly studies of working men and women of the Weimar Republic. “They retain their power today,” Yochelson claims, “because the harsh light and haphazard compositions convey the chaos of living in poverty.” I disagree. These pictures strike me as composed, not haphazard, with the subjects dignified in their stoical resignation to misery. When Yochelson insists, “In no instance was the photographer able to dwell on the subtleties of composition,” she confuses the brief time it took to snap the picture with a lack of compositional sense; the intuitive subtlety, to a photographer’s eye, may require only a second. Much can be said for Ansel Adams’ assessment of Riis’ pictures as “magnificent achievements in the field of humanistic photography. . . . I know of no contemporary work of this general character which gives such an impression of competence, integrity and intensity.”

Still, Yochelson and Czitrom do well to bring Riis to light again, and they ask provocative questions that deserve to be raised. Riis is great enough to withstand any amount of revisionist skepticism. And we have only to gain by considering our heroes in a more realistic light and a broader historical context.

--

On latimes.com/books

For more of Jacob Riis’ photographs of turn-of-the-century New York, go to latimes.com/jacobriis.