Jacob Riis

and

Camilo José Vergara

Presentation by Cheri Fakes

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• Jacob Riis was the third of fifteen children. He was born in Ribe, Denmark, on 3rd May, 1849.

• He worked as a carpenter in Copenhagen before emigrating to the United States in 1870. Unable to find work, he was often forced to spend the night in police station lodging houses.

• Riis did a variety of odd jobs before finding work with a news bureau in New York City in 1873. The following year he was recruited by the South Brooklyn News. In 1877 Riis became a police reporter for the New York Tribune.

• Aware of what it was like to live in poverty, Riis was determined to use this opportunity to employ his journalistic skills to communicate this to the public. He constantly argued that the "poor were the victims rather than the makers of their fate".

-- Wikipedia and Spartacus Schoolnet UK

Jacob Riis: The Man

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• In 1888 Riis was employed as a photo-journalist by the New York Evening Sun. Riis was among the first photographers to use flash powder, which enabled him to photograph interiors and exteriors of the slums at night. He also became associated with what later became known as muckraking journalism.

• In December, 1889, “An account of city life, illustrated by photographs,” appeared in Scribner's Magazine. This created a great deal of interest and the following year, a full-length version, How the Other Half Lives, was published. The book was seen by Theodore Roosevelt, the New York Police Commissioner, and he had the city police lodging houses that were featured in the book closed down.

• Riis also wrote over a dozen books including Children of the Poor (1892), Out of Mulberry Street (1898), The Battle With the Slum (1902) and Children of the Tenement (1903).

• Jacob Riis, whose autobiography, The Making of An American, was published in 1901, died in Barrie, Massachusetts, on 26th May, 1914.

-- Wikipedia and Spartacus Schoolnet UK

Jacob Riis: The Man

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-- Wikipedia and Spartacus Schoolnet UK

“Over the next twenty-five years Riis wrote and lectured on the problems of the poor. This included magic lantern shows and one observer noted that "his viewers moaned, shuddered, fainted and even talked to the photographs he projected, reacting to the slides not as images but as a virtual reality that transported the new York slum world directly into the lecture hall."

The work of Riis inspired Lincoln Steffens, whom many consider to be the "godfather" of investigative journalism. Steffens once wrote:

"He (Riis) not only got the news; he cared about the news. He hated passionately all tyrannies, abuses, miseries, and he fought them. He was a terror to the officials and landlords responsible, as he saw it, for the desperate condition of the tenements where the poor lived. He had exposed them in articles, books, and public speeches, and with results. All the philanthropists in town knew and backed Riis, who was able then, as a reformer and a reporter, too, to force the appointment of a Tenement House Commission that he gently led and fiercely drove to an investigation and a report which - followed up by this terrible reporter-resulted in the wiping out of whole blocks of rookeries, the making of small parks, and the regulation of the tenements."

Jacob Riis: The Man

Jacob Riis: The RecapHe was…:

- a Danish American social reformer

- a muckraking journalist

- a social documentary photographer

- his photography and writing subjects were the impoverished of NYC

- he’s known for his dedication to using his talents to help this population

- he helped with the implementation of "model tenements" in NY

- he was one of the most prominent proponents of using new flash powder technology

- he is considered a pioneer in photography.

Jacob Riis: The Photography

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Necktie workshop in Division Street tenement (1889)

A home on Bleeker Street (at Mercer and Greene streets)

(1889)

Jacob Riis: The Photography

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Knee-pants at 45 cents a dozen – a Ludlow Street sweater’s shop

(1890)

New York City peddler (1890)

Jacob Riis: The Photography

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Bohemian Cigar Makers in a Tenement Sweatshop

Bandit’s Roost (1890)

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• Camilo José was born in Santiago, Chile in 1944. He was very poor, and eventually immigrated to the United States and moved specifically to New York City in the early 1970’s, where he is now based and known as a writer, documentarian, and photographer.

• His work is often compared to Jacob Riis due to his photographic documentation of American slums during the 1970s.

• He is known for his “rephotography” approach to documentation, where he photographs specific neighborhoods and buildings from the exact vantage point at regular intervals over many years to document changes over time.

• Places he has photographed include the housing projects of Chicago, the South Bronx of New York, Detroit Michigan, and others.

• He was a graduate student in Sociology at Columbia University, and he credits his time there as a period that sensitized him to the complex influences that environment had on social behavior.

-- Wikipedia and Spartacus Schoolnet UK

Camilo José Vergara: The Man

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• The invention of Kodachrome 64 film in 1974 made Vergara think of utilizing color photographic prints as records of the changing urban landscapes that he was documenting.

• He would document his subjects systematically, traveling from one subway stop to the next, photograph the block surrounding each subway stop, and expand his target area outward.

• Vergara used ten years-worth of these photographs to create and publish, “The New American Ghetto,” with Rutgers University Press. This publication gained great acclaim from sociologists and photographic critics, and he received the Robert E. Park Award of the American Sociological Association for this work.

• His proposals for creating work are sometimes controversial, as is evidenced by his “Skyscraper Ruins Park” proposal, which requested that 12 blocks of downtown Detroit be declared a preservative acropolis for approximately 100 deteriorating skyscrapers. This proposal was in direct opposition of the politicians of Detroits’ efforts to rebuild and boost local economy.

-- Wikipedia and Spartacus Schoolnet UK

Camilo José Vergara: The Man

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• Even though this project came out of an urge for a quantitative method for recording change over time in specific areas, he also allowed himself to make other photographs of specific residents and small details he found within neighborhoods, and printed these in color.

• Thanks to technological advances in photography, documentation, and communication/information sharing systems, Vergara is able to present his work in innovative ways.

• He can combine the ability to display both the ‘vertical’ (change over time) and the ‘horizontal’ (change across space) aspects of his work, and give his work further context through immediately available text directly linked to each work.

• His main work has been displayed on “Invincible Cities” since 2004. This website is just one of many ways in which he displays his work, which has appeared in exhibitions, books, and magazines.

• Vergara won the MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” in 2002, and served as a fellow at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humantites (MARCH) at Rutgers in 2003/04. This year, he has been awarded the Berline Prize fellowship for his work, and will be spending the academic spring semester of 2010 at the American Academy in Berin.

-- Wikipedia and Spartacus Schoolnet UK

Camilo José Vergara: The Man

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-- Wikipedia and Spartacus Schoolnet UK

Camilo José Vergara: The Recap

He is…:

- a Chilean American sociologist

- a social documentary photographer

- an artist whose photography and writing subjects consist of urban environments that cyclically decay and are somehow reborn

- a photographer who utilizes both quantitative and qualitative approaches to his work

- adaptive to technologies available to help communicate his subjects

- an award-winning photographer with notable distinctions

- an artist whose work has been published in seven books to-date

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-- Wikipedia and Spartacus Schoolnet UK

Camilo José Vergara: The Phtography

Time Lapse Series in Camden (1979 – 2004)

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-- Wikipedia and Spartacus Schoolnet UK

Camilo José Vergara: The Phtography

First Steadfast Baptist Church, 467 East Bowen St., Chicago (1987-2001)

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-- Wikipedia and Spartacus Schoolnet UK

Camilo José Vergara: The Phtography

St. Rest M.B. Church, 3065 West Polk St., Chicago (1980 – 1997)

Questions to Consider:• In what ways are Riis and Vergara’s work similar? Different?

• Are there comparable links from these artists’ work to Venkamesh’s work?

• Given that each of these artists identify with their subject matter, do the same ethical issues regarding representation factor into these artists’ works?

• How do these forms of representation (dis/)similar from the documentary we watched in class?

• Is there any difference between photographic representation and photographic representation when documenting data in qualitative research projects?