(Woman with a Plank for a Bed)"Many of the people shown in Riis's work looked at the camera and the photographer at the moment of exposure. They did not realize that they were looking at you and me and all humanity for ages of time. Their postures and groupings are not contrived; the moment of exposure was selected more for the intention of truth than for the intention of effect." (Ansel Adams)
Jacob Riis, Danish photographer who made a name for himself in the late 1880s as the pioneer of flash-photography in America, used his new technology to penetrate the darkest alleyways of New York. He coined the term "mudracking" for journalism, and was renowned for using his artistic skills to reveal the slum conditions of the waves of immigrants (like himself) that flocked to America after the Civil War.
He was a man who had much personal experience in injustice against the poor. Before he achieved success with the New York Evening Sun, he had lived in a series of filthy tenement halls. His only companion was a stray dog, which a policeman - for fun - beat to death in front of him. Once he had achieved fame, he wrote a series of treaties lamenting on the treatment of the poor - although he remained a racist and a misogynist until he died.
The democratizing impulse of his depictions of the homeless, the poorest members of the city, was a larger aspect of the democratization of artistic subject that Modernism ushered in. Suddenly, it was not only the beautiful or the sublime that could create art - it could be the mundane, the grubbiness of the city, the people who lurked in the dark, not prepared to be seen.
