Riis, Jacob. Rediscovering Jacob Riis: Exposure Journalism in Turn-of-the-Century New York by Bonnie Yochelson and Daniel Czitrom.

University of Chicago Press, 2014. Wraps, fine, as new. Previously published in 2007. 296 pages. Illustrated. “Before publishing his pioneering book How the Other Half Lives--a photojournalistic investigation into the poverty of New York’s tenement houses, home to three quarters of the city’s population--Jacob Riis (1849-1914) spent his first years in the United States as an immigrant and itinerant laborer, barely surviving on his carpentry skills until he landed a job as a muckraking reporter. These early experiences left Riis with an empathy for the lives of immigrants that would show through in his iconic photos.” (From back cover) Summary:

Rediscovering Jacob Riis is a comprehensive biographical and historical re-examination of the life, work, and legacy of Jacob Riis, the influential 19th-century journalist, social reformer, and photographer whose work helped expose the harsh living conditions of New York City’s poorest residents.

The book is structured in two complementary parts:

• Historian Daniel Czitrom places Riis’s life and journalism in the broader context of Gilded Age New York — exploring the city’s rapid immigration, political machines, competitive newspaper culture, rising evangelical reform movements, and labor politics. Czitrom traces Riis’s journey from an impoverished Danish immigrant and itinerant laborer to a reporter with deep first-hand experience of urban poverty. He examines how Riis’s work as a muckraking journalist culminated in his landmark investigations of tenement housing and other social issues, arguing that Riis’s empathy and reform impulse continue to influence how we think about urban inequality.

• Art historian Bonnie Yochelson focuses on Riis’s use of photography. She challenges the simplistic myth of Riis as a great photographic artist, showing instead how he initially relied on amateur collaborators, later learned to use photography himself, and eventually curated images from professional photographers. Yochelson argues that Riis’s real innovation was not artistic excellence but his ability to harness photography as a tool for social advocacy and public persuasion.

The book is illustrated with nearly seventy of Riis’s photographs and situates his work within both his own time and ours, highlighting the enduring relevance of his questions about poverty, housing, immigration, and the role of media in reform.

Overall, Rediscovering Jacob Riis offers both critical scholarship and vivid historical narrative, giving readers a fuller, more nuanced understanding of Riis as journalist, reformer, and figure in American social history.