Jacob Riis

Born May 3, 1849, in Denmark,  Jacob Riis was concerted one the fathers of photography for adopting the use of flash in flash photography. Riis came to America in 1870 at the age of 21 and moved to New York, starting out with no food, no money, and living in the poor conditions of the police lodging houses. He spent three years doing odd jobs till he took up journalism and became a police reporter for The New York Evening Sun. He worked and reported about the poorest and most dangerous parts of New York. He would document the lives of the immigrants, and poor people who lived in those parts and with his camra. He went on to write "How the Other Half Lives" which was published in 1889, and after the success of his first book he wrote a follow up volume "Children of the Poor" published in 1892. He also wrote a auto-biography "The Making of an American" publishes in 1901. He was an amazing writer, journalist and photographer. He captured the live style and the people who lived without money, food, shelter. He started from a homeless man doing random jobs to make little amounts of money, to a best-selling author of the time and photographer who opened the peoples eyes to the hard life of the slum.

I like Jacob Riis's  pictures because they make you realize how hard it was to live in the slum and be poor. Because he once was homeless, he really dedicated himself to showing people the hard life of the poor.
What I take away from the first picture is it doesn't take money to love someone. Sometimes family is all you have, and he captures that with the little girl, holding the baby on her lap.
I'm not going to say I "like" the second picture because its sad but I think that the picture is really meaningful because it shows how some people is the late 1800's lived. They all lived together in small houses trying to find shelter and he really captures how the lifestyle is and the way they have to life to survive.
 The third picture is well taken because it shows what "the slum" was like. People on the street, clothes hung between houses, many people sharing one small house. But I think the thing that makes the picture so powerful is the emotions on the adult and children faces. You can tell that they never chose to live that that and you can tell that their not very happy.
The emotions of the people in Jacob Riis's photo's really make the pictures as powerful and meaningful as they are. He really captures the lives and life style of the slum and the people from it from the late 1800's.