How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York by Jacob Riis was a ground-breaking book that documented the squalid living conditions in the New York City tenements in the 1880’s.   The book evolved from a magazine article in Scribners magazine in 1889 and is one of the first examples of photojournalism. Riis, a successful police reporter, used the newly invented technique of flash photography to capture images of the dark, unlit corners of the slums.  The title is a reference to a sentence in Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais: “one half of the world does not know how the other half lives”. Combined with sketches, narrative and statistics, Riis portrayed a world unknown or overlooked by the middle- and upper-classes of society where poor migrants and immigrants lived in unsanitary housing and often worked in sweatshops for pennies a day.  He assumed that raising the consciousness (and conscience) of the public about the poor conditions and the crime rate, drunkenness and recklessness that were the consequence would motivate efforts to make improvements. The direct result was a decade of what we would now call “urban renewal” in the Lower East Side, where tenements were torn down, schools reformed, child labor eliminated and sweatshops closed.

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