Jacob Riis

Jacob August Riis was born in Ribe, Denmark, in 1849 and emigrated to the United States in 1870. After years of struggling as a laborer, he became a police reporter for the New York Tribune, where he witnessed firsthand the appalling poverty and overcrowding in Manhattan's slums. His landmark work, "How the Other Half Lives" (1890), combined stark photographs and vivid prose to document tenement life, shocking middle-class readers and prompting significant social change, including tenement house legislation. Riis continued writing and lecturing on urban reform, publishing works such as "The Children of the Poor" (1892) and "The Making of an American" (1901). His legacy endures as a foundational figure in documentary photography and investigative journalism, whose work directly influenced future reformers like Theodore Roosevelt.