Jacob Riis, the Reformer

I head back home today with the pictures of Jacob A Riis in my head. Riis was an immigrant from Denmark who became a police reporter in NYC for the New York Tribune and the Associated Press in the mid nineteenth century. His beat was the Lower East Side Slums and the area around Mulberry Street. He turned into a social reformer and his pictures vividly record the plight of the poor in NYC. His book How the Other Half Live is still a powerful piece of visual and written work, I now have a copy for my home library.