He is also regarded as a pioneer photographer, due to him using a lot of early flash work within his practice.
In 1889 Riis wrote a magazine article for Scribner's, which talked about the poor living conditions in some areas of New York, with his images placed next to the article for added information. The city's rich newspaper owners tried to exclude the article due to its disturbing content, but it soon increased in popularity. Riis decided to expand the content, and make it into a book called 'How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York. The New York Times praised it, calling it a "powerful book". His photographs were in a photojournalistic style which he used to hopefully shock the wealthy New Yorker's into taking better care of those who have very little, he had to do this through photographs along side text because he realised that text alone wasn't creating his desired shock effect.
Whats interesting of Riis' writing is that it wasn't written with a common use of being objective, but he writes harshly of the Italians, Irish, Jews and Chinese, but apart from those judgments he did write the book in a sympathetic way, to try and call for social reform.
What I really like about Riis' work, is that he shows the viewer exactly what the living conditions are like for the poorest people living in New York City. He does this in an almost mechanical looking technique, where he just points the camera in the room or the street, at about waist height, and captures whats in front of him. It means that his photographs have a very realistic feel to them, because there isn't any creative angles used which might make the photograph feel of something else than whats its trying to show. You get the feeling that Riis is trying to show the viewer exactly what he see's in front of his own eyes, which leaves it up to the viewer to think what ever they want to think about the images.
I think this way of working is very simple, but also really effective when trying to show viewers in an informative manner what the living conditions of these people are like. Riis' technique of going into his subjects homes makes the viewer feel very included in their lives which allows the photographs to have a greater impact and thus more effective in educating what their lives are really like. I think in his photographs of living areas the subjects he captures within the frame add an extra amount of information but are not entirely needed because the room itself would speak for their living conditions.
I think 'How the other half live', has been very motivating to me in my project because its shown me to get even closer to the people I am photographing and try to show the viewer exactly how homeless are living. One idea I could follow would be to document the different type of ways homeless people are living, such as in squats, tents and hostels, in an intimate way.
Looking back over Riis' images, whats nice about them is that everything is in focus within the image so the viewer can study every little detail in the image. This reminds me of my images that I took using my wide angle lens and long exposures at f/22. Maybe I could use this technique to make sure everything in my image is in focus.