Since the discovery of America, people from all over the world have been coming topromised land.? Home of the brave, land of the free! Jacob Riis evocative black and white photographs, taken more than a century ago, propel us both backward and forward through history. Jacob August Riis, a New York City police reporter, found his world transformed with the advent offlashlight powder.? This compelling discovery, a very primitive flash photography, allowed Riis the opportunity to photograph the inside world of the Manhattan slums. Jacob Riis, the author of the bestseller How the Other Half Lives, hated poverty because it reminded him of his own tumultuous past. Riis left Denmark for New York at the age of 21. He was poor as the other immigrants, sleeping in doorways like many other adults and children. Through his photography, he exposed the horrible living conditions of the urban poor and the rapidly increasingdisease? of poverty in New York.
As we dwell within the pages of his personalmanuscript,? one finds oneself simultaneously intrigued and repulsed by the photographs within. Photographs that are often so deeply personal in content, so emotionally charged, we feel like unwelcome spectator. Through the pages of his book, the author includes some powerful dialog "We don't buy no bread; we buy beer," said the boy??his only bed was a heap of dirty straw on the floor, his daily diet a crust in the morning, nothing else.?.
As Riis writes,only the poor abandon their children? they come in raga, a newspaper often the only wrap? the real foundlings, the children of the gutter that are picked up by the police.? As he describes the heartbreaking reality of the city'swaifs? he writesthe bodies of drowned children turn up in the rivers? the body of a little lad crushed to death and no one had missed him? a little party of four kids drinking beer out of a milk can in the hallway.?.
The city's orphanages were often the last bastions of hope for those left to die on the city streets.