How the Other Half Lives

I wanna walk these streets to see what we're not paying attention to, what we're not changing." This kind of blindness is not new.

In 1890, the journalist Jacob Riis, that's R-I-I-S, published How the Other Half Lives.

It was a landmark book because it, they included photographs of the crowded tenements of New York's Lower East Side precisely because so many comfortable New Yorkers had trained themselves not to see them.

A generation earlier, Charles Dickens built a career on forcing Victorian England to look at the poor it had decided were irrelevant.

And so he began experimenting with that, and that is how he was able to go into the tenements with his camera, using flash powder, to illuminate the interiors of what he saw, people packed into rooms and their room conditions, and then show those to the public to make it very clear exactly how people lived.

And of course, he translated that into a book that he wrote, a well-known book called How the Other Half Lives.

I ran into him once, I believe, an anecdote with Teddy Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, an early commissioner for the police in Manhattan before he became his climb to the national offices.

And I think he spent time with Reese going out and taking photographs.