Jacob Riis essays

Jacob Riis essays Yet even from Hell's Kitchen had I not long before been driven forth with my camera by a band of angry women, who pelted me with brickbats and stones on my retreat, shouting at me never to come back.... The children know generally what they want and they go for it by the shortest cut. I found that out, whether I had flowers to give or pictures to take. . . Their determination to be "took" the moment the camera hove into sight, in the most striking pose they could hastily devise, was always the most formidable bar to success I met." That is an excerpt from Riis book Children of the Poor. Jacob Riis was a journalist and photographer in the late 1800s. Many considered him to be a muckraker who carried a camera. His goal was to take photographs to back up his writing and allow other Americans to see what was really going on in the country. Riis used words and images to reach the souls of middle class Americans and saved the lives of countless fellow immigrants. To get his message acros s, Riis utilized a unique blend of photography, reform, and journalistic reporting that put him in very high esteem of people such as Theodore Roosevelt, who regarded him as the "the most useful citizen of New York". His images, accompanied by his reporting, had an immediate and extraordinary impact on society, inspiring reforms that affected the lives of millions of people. Riis's reliance on specific, hard facts as weapons of social criticism pioneered a style of crusading journalism that continues today. His use of the camera to bring light to the circumstances and destitution of early immigrants to this nation became a model for judging the merits of photography in the following decades. Despite the fact that the progressive movement was ...