Educational Media Reviews Online

Jacob Riis' classic How the Other Half Lives is considered a landmark on par with Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Riis' 1890 work accelerated the call for decent housing conditions in New York City. The Other Half Revisted: The Legacy of Jacob A. Riis is a video documentary about his social documentation as the country's first photojournalist.

Riis immigrated to the United States from Denmark in the early 1870's and knew the poverty and streets of which he would later write. He was the first to bring a camera into the tenements being built to solve the housing shortage for the thousands of immigrants pouring into New York City. It was the Age of the Alienist, when Teddy Roosevelt was NYC Police Commissioner and children were used for slave labor and slept on door stoops. His use of the newly developed flash photography brought the shocking face of poverty to every newspaper reader's morning table. A form of voyeurism gave way to a sense of social responsibility among his readers. His lectures complete with enormous lantern slide images, columns, and books were very popular.

The Other Half Revisted uses archival film footage, drawings, and Riis' sepia toned photographs to detail tenement conditions of the era. It was still the time of ultimate priviledge of the upper classes. Rich were rich because they were moral, the poor were poor because they were not. Riis' own stereotypes of the poor are not glossed over, either. Included are modern day photo essays on the plight of the homeless, a tougher assignment. Images are far less shocking to the desensitized. As The Other Half Revisted demonstrates there is still an assault on the poor, especially as a societal scapegoat, and the images of the poor and homeless have not really changed in 100 years.