Exploring Theories of Power and Viewership through the Lens of Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives

Less than 50 years after its invention, activists began using photography as a tool to call attention to atrocities and hopefully improve the lives of others. Jacob Riis was one of those activists, using his flash photographs to show Americans, especially the New York elite, the dirty and dangerous conditions of the nation’s ever-growing immigrant population. In 1890, Riis published his first book: How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the tenements of New York, pairing his graphic descriptions of the problems immigrants faced with photographs and illustrations of photographs he took himself.[1] How the Other Half Lives was a sensation, widely read and reviewed by newspapers across the country.[2] This essay will look at the work of three theorists that examine spectatorship, archives, and images of suffering — Rodney Carter’s 2006 paper “Of Things Said and Unsaid: Power, Archival Silences, and Power in Silence,” Roland Barthes’s 1980 book Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, and Ariella Azoulay’s 2008 book The Civil Contract of Photography. How do the photos in Riis’s book, its text, and its newspaper reviews reflect their ideas of how to analyze images and how power is displayed in archives? <a href="https://sydneyweiner3.medium.com/exploring-theories-of-power-and-viewership-through-the-lens-of-jacob-riiss-how-the-other-half-316bdc107459">Website</a>