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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Ph.D. Thesis Project - Jacob Riis’ Two Halves: A Study between his Photographic and Literary Work
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Cinéma & Cie
Rebeca Romero Escrivá
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Universitat de València Estudi General (UVEG)
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Ph.D. Thesis Project - Jacob Riis’ Two Halves: A Study between his Photographic and Literary Work
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JACOB RIIS’ TWO HALVES:
A STUDY BETWEEN HIS PHOTOGRAPHIC AND LITERARY WORK
Rebeca Romero Escrivá / Ph.D. Thesis Project
Universitat de València Estudi General (UVEG)




   The art of writing presents, in the American tradition, some more thorough perspectives than
those usually provided by the study of the national history of European literature. Las dos mitades
de Jacob Riis. Un estudio entre su obra fotográfica y literaria (Jacob Riis’ Two Halves: A Study
Between His Photographic and Literary Work) is a critical and contrasted research work (directed
by Prof. Vicente Sánchez-Biosca) which tries to establish the reading value of the work of Riis,
the Danish photographer and journalist emigrated to the United States in 1870, within the heart
of the tradition of American literature, photography and mass media of the 19th century’s ending
and the beginning of the 20th. The hypothetical point of departure is that Riis’ photographic and
literary productions cannot be estimated but studied separately. This hypothesis serves to set forth
the notion that the interdisciplinary research character effectively responds to its own object. The
segment of the United States history portrayed by Riis invites us to change the parameters of the
traditional study of the photography close to the “Fine Arts”. Since we estimate Riis’ language
with a different perspective from that of pure aesthetics, the evaluation of his photography can be
placed within a more wider framework: that of the “work of the art” – to use the Emerson’s phrase
– as opposed to a mere “work of art”. Riis, first of all, was a social reformer. He took pictures for
its nominal value, and so he tried to illustrate his texts about social denunciation of the unhealthy
and massive living conditions of the tenement houses for the different communities of immigrants
of the south zone of Manhattan (Lower East Side, Little Italy and Chinatown).
   Riis’ starting point, therefore, was the text, and his main work, How the Other Half Lives. Studies
Among the Tenements of New York is, first of all, an American text2. To determine the question of
the genre of the work, among the realistic and naturalistic fiction and the muckraker literature, is
one of the aims of this research. How the Other Half Lives is a text set in the history of the
American literature, because its purpose, which is the improvement of the living conditions in a
big city, relates to the aboriginal motive of the true foundation of the American cities, so that Riis’
topic (the tenement houses) can be linked with the metaphor that John Winthrop declared on board
of the Arbella: the “City on a hill”. The city that Riis describes, nevertheless, forces us to lower
our look to locate it in the muck-collector: in the poorest neighborhoods of the ever-expanding
New York. As good muckraker, Riis cleans rather than beholds the city that has to be a celestial
and human crown on earth. In this respect, the rhetoric of the American puritanism, from Winthrop
and even Bunyan to Riis, can be discerned in the appraisal of How the Other Half Lives and leads
us to analyze the ambivalent relation of the intellectual in America against the city in the American
context of the postwar period, when urbanization and industrialization coincides with the new
responsibilities of the writer and the photographer in the public life.
   Riis was obliged to recover and appeal to the ethical temperature of the Christian belief that could
have survived in the spirit of the American readers, accustomed to the blindness that was imposed
and assumed by a hedonistic and capitalist world that disregards the underprivileged. Significantly

CINÉMA & CIE, vol. IX, no. 12, Spring 2009                                                         151
REBECA ROMERO ESCRIVÁ

enough, it was President Roosevelt (of whom Riis was a friend and political assistant), who rescued
and distorted the term “muckraker”, from John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim Progress, to refer to the
journalists who (as Riis himself) were speakers of the social denunciation. In other words, the big
changes undergone by America as a civilization should not affect our will to interpret texts like Riis’
as a critique and improvement of the realities attained by the democratic experiment.
  On the other hand, the same paradigmatic shift that we have indicated in the literary area should
also be applied to Riis’ photographic work. Since the photographs were meant to illustrate the
text, we cannot as a result exempt Riis’ work from being rigorously evaluated when compared to
other contemporary photographers, such as Arnold Genthe and Frances Benjamin Johnston, or
those belonging to the following generation, such as Lewis Hine, with whom he shares the special
conscientiousness that he dedicated to infancy, to the improvement of the living conditions of the
children. In fact, although Riis took pictures only during five years of his long experience as a
journalist, he was the first documentary photographer who put the magnesium flash into practice
as a lighting source. This technique allowed Riis to work in the darkness of the slums tenements.
With a camera of 4x5 inches and negative of crystal (dry plate), circumstances forced Riis to learn
the job of the photographer, since no assistant wanted to expose himself to the dangers of crossing
the slums quarters by night, as we see in his well-known pictures In the Sun Office, 3 A.M. (1890),
Street Arabs in Sleeping Quarters, Five Cent Spot. Lodgers in a Crowded Bayard Street
Tenement (1889), or Men’s Lodging Room in the West 47th Street Station (1892).
  Professional photographers, as writers, are submitted to the appraisal or the judgment of a
candid world of readers, whose opinion – as citizens – has a particular importance. The
competition or power of photography will not be measured against other arts, as the painting or
the novel or even movies, but against reality itself: this would be the subject that human being as
such tries to interpret (and to dominate) differently and always as far as he wants a common
world, that is to say, the hope to forge a community (or to found a city) without abandoning the
zeal of justice.
  Finally, I wish to add that, beyond the purely theoretical study, there has also been a sort of
practical conclusion to the essay on Riis: the edition of the catalogue Entre meses (Between
Months), a photographic exhibition inaugurated in the Casa de Cultura de Calpe (Alicante) and
also taken to Valencia, in which I have developed the concept of the measurement of space with
regards to time opposing the old city to the modern one. The other half of the Lower East Side of
the 21st century can be seen in its pages3.

For contact and information: rebeca.romero@uv.es

1     Thesis in progress at the Departamento de Teoría de los Lenguajes y Ciencias de la Comunicación,
      Universitat de València Estudi General (UVEG), Spain. Rebeca Romero Escrivá is assistant professor
      at the Valencian International University (VIU).
2     Though Jacob Riis is known from his first book of denunciation, How the Other Half Lives (Scribner,
      New York 1890), his work as a writer (apart from several articles that he wrote as a journalist and were
      published in the daily press) includes the titles Children of the Poor (Scribner, New York 1892), Out of
      Mulberry Street (Century, New York 1898), A Ten Years War (Houghton, Boston 1900), Children of the
      Tenements (Macmillan, New York 1903), The Peril and Preservation of the Home (Jacobs, Philadelphia
      1903) and Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen (Macmillan, New York 1919). Riis also wrote works of
      fiction. None of them was illustrated by photographs, which reinforces the idea that Riis was using the
      image only for its documentary value.
3     Rebeca Romero Escrivá, Entre meses. Una exposición fotográfica, Sala de Bellas Artes, Casa de Cultura
      Jaume Pastor i Fluixà, Calpe (Alicante), April 2007. With a prologue by Vicente Aupí and introductory
      notes by Javier Alcoriza.

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