Page 148 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

Expanded Media - and the MediaPlex 148/206
Jacob Riis: How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (1890) + Bandit’s Roost, Hell’s Kitchen + Gotham Court Slums + other social-documentary images c1880s
By the 1890s, popular newspapers were using the half-tone process to reproduce actual photographs (rather than hand-engraved copies of photographs), and Riis - who was more an investigative journalist and social reformer than a professional photographer - realised that he could use photography - and the recently invented flash-gun (flash-powder) to illuminate the dark and poverty- stricken underworld of New York’s lower East-side, Five Points and Hell’s Kitchen.These areas of the city had been where thousands of migrating Irish had arrived after the Potato Famine, and subsequently where Jewish, Negro, German and other expatriate poor Europeans had sought cheap accommodation - often just bed-space, or an unlicensed bar or ‘downtown morgue’ or flop-house where they could sleep. Whole families often lived in these areas too in appalling scenes of poverty, overcrowding, disease and crime. Riis published his How the Other Half Lives in 1890. Containing over 100 photographs, it became an important adjunct to his newspaper images, and the narrative basis for his highly successful magic lantern slide show lectures -with sections called ‘The Reign of Rum’, ‘The Wrecks and the Waste’, ‘A Raid on the Stale Beer Dives’, ‘Chinatown’, ‘Jewtown’ and ‘The Downtown Back-Alleys’.
Martin Scorsese recreated New York’s Five Points very successfully in his Gangs of New York (2002), though his film was set in the 1860s - 30 years before Riis began documenting the area. Nevertheless Scorsese's film gives some indication - in a series of brilliant cinematic narrative illustrations, of the anarchy, poverty and lawlessness of this area. Indeed Riis' photographs must have been an invaluable reference-source for the scenographer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHVUPri5tjA
Riis’ social-documentary photographs represent one of the first examples of crusading photo- journalism, and his book an early example of a photographic essay - the power of his essay resting on the veracity of his photographs, revealing to the general public the appalling poverty of recent immigrants to the USA. Around this same time, scientists like Francis Galton were convinced that they could identify character-types (from criminal-types’ to scientists and intellectuals) from a subject’s physiognomy, and Henry Bowditch made his ‘set’ typological composite photo-portraits (there are several) in this light: