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He was based in a press office across from police headquarters on Mulberry Street. During these stints as a police reporter, Riis worked the most crime-ridden and impoverished slums of the city. Through his own experiences in the poorhouses, and witnessing the conditions of the poor in the city slums, he decided to make a difference for them.

Riis had for some time been wondering how to show the squalor of which he wrote more vividly than his words could express. He tried sketching, but was incompetent at this. In early , however, Riis was startled to read that "a way had been discovered to take pictures by flashlight. The darkest corner might be photographed that way. This was the introduction of flash photography. Recognizing the potential of the flash, Riis informed a friend, Dr. Nagle found two more photographer friends, Henry Piffard and Richard Hoe Lawrence, and the four of them began to photograph the slums. Their first report was published in the New York newspaper The Sun on February 12, ; it was an unsigned article by Riis which described its author as "an energetic gentleman, who combines in his person, though not in practice, the two dignities of deacon in a Long Island church and a police reporter in New York".

Riis and his photographers were among the first Americans to use flash photography.

The process involved removing the lens cap , igniting the flash powder and replacing the lens cap; the time is taken to ignite the flash powder sometimes allowed a visible image blurring created by the flash. Riis's first team soon tired of the late hours, and Riis had to find other help. Both his assistants were lazy and one was dishonest, selling plates for which Riis had paid. Riis sued him in court successfully. He took the equipment to the potter's field cemetery on Hart Island to practice, making two exposures.

The result was seriously overexposed but successful. For some three years, Riis combined his own photographs with others commissioned of professionals, donations by amateurs and purchased lantern slides, all of which formed the basis for his photographic archive. Because so much of the work was done at night, he was able to photograph the worst elements of the New York slums, the dark streets, tenement apartments, and "stale-beer" dives, and documented the hardships faced by the poor and criminal, especially in the vicinity of notorious Mulberry Street.

Riis accumulated a supply of photography and attempted to submit illustrated essays to magazines.

But when an editor at Harper's New Monthly Magazine said that he liked the photographs but not the writing, and would find another writer, Riis was despondent about magazine publication and instead thought of speaking directly to the public. This was not easy. The obvious venue would be a church, but several churches—including Riis's own—demurred, fearing either that the talks would offend the churchgoers' sensibilities or that they would offend rich and powerful landlords.

Lacking money, Riis partnered with W. Craig, a Health Department clerk. Riis and Craig's lectures, illustrated with lantern slides, made little money for the pair, but they both greatly increased the number of people exposed to what Riis had to say and also enabled him to meet people who had the power to effect change, notably Charles Henry Parkhurst and an editor of Scribner's Magazine , who invited him to submit an illustrated article. It included nineteen of his photographs rendered as line drawings. Its publication brought an invitation to expand the material into an entire book.

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Riis had already been thinking of writing a book and began writing it during nights. Days were for reporting for the New York Sun , evenings for public speaking. The book reused the eighteen line drawings that had appeared in the Scribner's article and also seventeen reproductions using the halftone method, [43] and thus "[representing] the first extensive use of halftone photographic reproductions in a book". How the Other Half Lives sold well and was much quoted.

Reviews were generally good, although some reviewers criticized it for oversimplifying and exaggerating. Children of the Poor was a sequel in which Riis wrote of particular children that he had encountered. The Making of an American [48] , an autobiography, follows Riis's early life in Denmark and his struggles as an immigrant in the United States. The book also describes how Riis became a reporter and how his work in immigrant enclaves kindled his desire for social reforms.

Riis organized his autobiography chronologically, but each chapter illustrates a broader theme that America is a land of opportunity for those who are bold enough to take chances on their future. The autobiography is mostly straightforward, but Riis is not sure if his past should be told as a "love story", "if I am, to tell the truth I don't see how it can be helped.

Chapter 7 is distinct because Riis's wife, Elizabeth, describes her life in Denmark before she married Riis. Whereas How the Other Half Lives , and some of Riis's other books received praise from critics, he received a mixed reception for his autobiography. A New York Times reviewer dismissed it as a vanity project written for "close and intimate friends". He admired Riis's "dogged pluck" and "indomitable optimism", but dismissed an "almost colossal egotism—made up of equal parts of vanity and conceit" as a major characteristic of the author.

The reviewer anticipated the book would be "eagerly read by that large majority who have a craving and perennial interest in the personal and emotional incidents" within Riis's life. The value of Riis's autobiography lies in the description of his origins as a social reformer.

His early experiences in Ribe gave Riis a yardstick with which to measure tenement dwellers' quality of life. The account of the development of his powers of observation through his experiences as a poor immigrant lent authenticity to his news articles and larger works. Its themes of self-sufficiency, perseverance, and material success are prime examples of an archetype that successful Europeans like Riis used to demonstrate the exceptional opportunities that seem to exist only in the United States.

In spite of its triumphalist outlook, The Making of an American remains useful as a source for students of immigration history and sociology who want to learn more about the author of How The Other Half Lives and the social reform movement that he helped to define. Theodore Roosevelt introduced himself to Riis, offering to help his efforts somehow. Upon his appointment to the presidency of the Board of Commissioners of the New York City Police Department , Roosevelt asked Riis to show him nighttime police work.

During their first tour, the pair found that nine out of ten patrolmen were missing. Riis wrote about this for the next day's newspaper, and for the rest of Roosevelt's term the force was more attentive. Roosevelt closed the police-managed lodging rooms in which Riis had suffered during his first years in New York. Recently a man, well qualified to pass judgment, alluded to Mr. Jacob A. Riis as "the most useful citizen of New York".

Those fellow citizens of Mr. Riis who best know his work will be most apt to agree with this statement. The countless evils which lurk in the dark corners of our civic institutions, which stalk abroad in the slums, and have their permanent abode in the crowded tenement houses, have met in Mr. Riis the most formidable opponent ever encountered by them in New York City. For his part, Riis wrote a campaign biography of Roosevelt that praised him. A particularly important effort by Riis was his exposure of the condition of New York's water supply. Riis wrote:. I took my camera and went up in the watershed photographing my evidence wherever I found it.

Populous towns sewered directly into our drinking water.

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I went to the doctors and asked how many days a vigorous cholera bacillus may live and multiply in running water. About seven, said they.

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My case was made. The story resulted in the purchase by New York City of areas around the New Croton Reservoir , and may well have saved New Yorkers from an epidemic of cholera. Riis tried hard to have the slums around Five Points demolished and replaced with a park. His writings resulted in the Drexel Committee investigation of unsafe tenements; this resulted in the Small Park Act of Riis was not invited to the eventual opening of the park on June 15, , but went all the same, together with Lincoln Steffens.

In the last speech, the street cleaning commissioner credited Riis for the park and led the public in giving him three cheers of "Hooray, Jacob Riis! Riis wrote his autobiography, The Making of an American , in His daughter, Clara C. Riis, married Dr. William Clarence Fiske. He chronicled his time in the Forest Service in his book, Ranger Trails. Another son, Edward V. Riis remarried in , and with his new wife, Mary Phillips, relocated to a farm in Barre , Massachusetts.

Riis died at the farm on May 26, His second wife lived until , continuing work on the farm, working on Wall Street and teaching classes at Columbia University. Riis's concern for the poor and destitute often caused people to assume he disliked the rich. However, Riis showed no sign of discomfort among the affluent, often asking them for their support. He was approached by liberals who suspected that protests of alleged Spanish mistreatment of the Cubans was merely a ruse intended to provide a pretext for US expansionism; perhaps to avoid offending his friend Roosevelt, Riis refused the offer of good payment to investigate this and made nationalist statements.

Riis emphatically supported the spread of wealth to lower classes through improved social programs and philanthropy, but his personal opinion of the natural causes for poor immigrants' situations tended to display the trappings of a racist ideology. Several chapters of How the Other Half Lives for example, open with Riis' observations of the economic and social situations of different ethnic and racial groups via indictments of their perceived natural flaws; often prejudices that may well have been informed by scientific racism.

Riis's sincerity for social reform has seldom been questioned, but critics have questioned his right to interfere with the lives and choices of others. His audience comprised middle-class reformers, and critics say that he had no love for the traditional lifestyles of the people he portrayed. Stange argues that Riis "recoiled from workers and working-class culture " and appealed primarily to the anxieties and fears of his middle-class audience.

Libertarian economist Thomas Sowell argues that immigrants during Riis's time were typically willing to live in cramped, unpleasant circumstances as a deliberate short-term strategy that allowed them to save more than half their earnings to help family members come to America, with every intention of relocating to more comfortable lodgings eventually.

Many tenement renters physically resisted the well-intentioned relocation efforts of reformers like Riis, states Sowell, because other lodgings were too costly to allow for the high rate of savings possible in the tenements. Moreover, according to Sowell, Riis's own personal experiences were the rule rather than the exception during his era: like most immigrants and low-income persons, he lived in the tenements only temporarily before gradually earning more income and relocating to different lodgings.