Poverty. “How the Other Half Lives” by Jacob Riis Essay

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“How the Other Half Lives” was the first work that documented the terrifying living conditions in New York City slums. Jacobs managed to describe the miserable life of the poor immigrants that was ignored by the upper- and middle-class society. In particular, the journalist intended to uncover the poverty of the nineteenth century Lower East Side of Manhattan. In his work, Riis condemned the society that did not acknowledge the real living conditions of the immigrants. He believed that the book with photographs, graphic decryptions, and statistics would help people to be more aware of these conditions. In Riis’s interpretation, poverty was described as something atypical and unprecedented. The selected method was applied to grab the most of attention.

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To emphasize the perishable situation and to move the audience to the compassion of the poor, the author inserted numerous picture documents in the book that depicted the New York slums. The sensational photographic style created narratives in the traditions of that time. He succeeded in highlighting the urban scenes and portraying the starting and symbolic story of the poor. The photographic texts were a deliberate protest to the cultural traditions of the bourgeois society of the nineteenth century. The journalist’s images fixed the destroyed and the unstable like in the picture “Lodger in the Crowded Bayard Street Tenement –“Five Cents a Sport” where his unconventional framing of the extreme poverty was portrayed. The picture is the bright evidence living conditions of the poor. To enhance the atmosphere of humidity and misery the author writes: “Another room on the top floor, that had been examined a few nights before, was comparatively empty. There were only four persons in it….” (Riis 35).

Instead of photographing poor women with their children, Riis used to photograph women as drunkards and prostitutes. By this, he breaks all the traditional outlooks on the cultural notion of maternity, modesty, and privacy. All the women framed in the picture are impassive and frustrated with their faces expressing no hope for a better future. Moreover, they were imaged as immoral and isolated women rather than diligent housewives.

When describing the children Riis also used radical approaches that were not only terrifying but also cause waves of resentment. In the picture “In Poverty Gap, West Twenty-Eighth St. an English Coal-Heaver’s Home”, “the ignorance plays its part”. This is the image of “helpless despair” (Riis 78) and agony where family members sit around the terminally ill child. The tragedy of the story combines with the doctor’s indifference and inability to help. The starvation of children to death and numerous diseases caused, as the doctor mentioned, by the “improper nourishment” is also a kind of a calling that strikes the society.

Riis did his best to terrify his audience and insatiate it with a feeling of darkness, confusion, and fear. In his pictures, he portrayed apocalyptic plots and compared poverty with chaos. Thus, he intentionally aggravated the social status of the poor. The pessimistic images were a kind of a threat to the bourgeois society that both were frightened and confused. Riis’s plan to influence the public imagination by the photographic components turned out to be rather successful. The author realized that visualization supported by sharp thoughts and ideas could be a serious weapon in the struggle for the equality of the immigrants in the bourgeois society.

Works Cited

Riis, Jacob. How the Other Half Lives. Stilwell: Digireads.com. Publishing, 2005.

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IvyPanda. 2021. "Poverty. “How the Other Half Lives” by Jacob Riis." November 21, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/poverty-how-the-other-half-lives-by-jacob-riis/.

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IvyPanda. "Poverty. “How the Other Half Lives” by Jacob Riis." November 21, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/poverty-how-the-other-half-lives-by-jacob-riis/.

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