Jacob A. Riis

Jacob August Riis (1849–1914) was a Danish-born American journalist, photographer and social reformer. He emigrated to the United States in 1870, lived in poverty for several years and then became a police reporter for the New York Tribune and the Evening Sun, covering the slums of the Lower East Side. His book How the Other Half Lives, published in 1890 and illustrated with his pioneering flash photographs, shocked readers and helped bring about housing reform. A friend of Theodore Roosevelt, he continued to campaign for parks, schools and better tenements, and wrote an autobiography, The Making of an American.