Yochelson, in an essay on the photographs, is regrettably less responsive to their worth than her co-author. She rightly points out that in trying to establish photography as an art form, "art photographers sought models . . . to justify their own aesthetic claims. . . . [T]he older photographers' intentions were reinterpreted to fit the aesthetic needs of their disciples." She is arguing that one can't cite Riis as an important influence on Lewis Hine, Dorothea Lange and other social photographers because his work had all but vanished until it was unearthed in the 1940s. Fair enough. But she dismisses any artistic intentionality in his work by stressing his modest disclaimers about not being much of a photographer and noting that he took most of his pictures in a five-year period and only to illustrate his lantern-slide lectures.
Down and dirty
Rediscovering Jacob Riis Exposure Journalism and Photography in Turn-of-the-Century New York; Bonnie Yochelson and Daniel Czitrom; New Press: 288 pp., $35
Riis' images of sweatshops, alleys, "street arabs" (homeless children), police-station lodging rooms and tenement life remain unforgettably moving and display an uncanny connection of human beings to their environments not seen again until August Sander's masterly studies of working men and women of the Weimar Republic. "They retain their power today," Yochelson claims, "because the harsh light and haphazard compositions convey the chaos of living in poverty." I disagree. These pictures strike me as composed, not haphazard, with the subjects dignified in their stoical resignation to misery. When Yochelson insists, "In no instance was the photographer able to dwell on the subtleties of composition," she confuses the brief time it took to snap the picture with a lack of compositional sense; the intuitive subtlety, to a photographer's eye, may require only a second. Much can be said for Ansel Adams' assessment of Riis' pictures as "magnificent achievements in the field of humanistic photography. . . . I know of no contemporary work of this general character which gives such an impression of competence, integrity and intensity."
Still, Yochelson and Czitrom do well to bring Riis to light again, and they ask provocative questions that deserve to be raised. Riis is great enough to withstand any amount of revisionist skepticism. And we have only to gain by considering our heroes in a more realistic light and a broader historical context.
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On latimes.com/books
For more of Jacob Riis' photographs of turn-of-the-century New York, go to latimes.com/jacobriis.
