Contrast is the oxygen of journalism. So in the Gilded Age, as the J.P. Morgans' lavish carriages made their way up Fifth Avenue to palaces of splendor, the fact that the majority of New Yorkers lived in squalor was grist for the mill and eagerly devoured by readers.
Among exemplars of the chronicling of lives of the poor were novelist Stephen Crane, who wrote Maggie, a Girl of the Streets in 1893 and Lincoln Steffens, whose The Shame of the Cities in 1904 lifted the lid off the roiling pot of municipal corruption. But Bonnie Yochelson and her fellow authors argue in Rediscovering Jacob Riis -- Exposure Journalism and Photography in Turn-of-the-Century New York, these muckrakers lacked the sense of moral uplift brought by their colleague, Jacob Riis, whose 1890 work, How the Other Half Lives, used photographs to detail the breakdown of the family, small children imprisoned in sweatshops, and homelessness on a grand scale.
In his day and beyond, Riis proved a controversial figure for faith in private and religious charity to remedy these ills and for the possibility of creating affordable housing for the masses, whom immigration had dumped into the urban milieu in numbers far to large for cities to assimilate.
Bonnie Yochelson, former curator of prints and photographs at the Museum of the City of New York, and Daniel Czitrom, professor of history at Mount Holyoke, offer scores of Riis's photographs and revisit many of the questions that poverty reformers from Jacob Riis to John Edwards wrestle with:
"What is the structural relationship between persistent poverty and new immigrants? If different "races" and nationalities possess inherent moral and cultural characteristics, how can that be reconciled with the American creed of individualism? How does environment shape "character"? What are the proper roles of government, private philanthropy, and religion in reform efforts? How important is spectacle and entertainment in rousing the public conscience?"
