Jacob Riis

Jacob August Riis (1849–1914) was a Danish-born American journalist, photographer and reformer. He emigrated in 1870, drifted for years through poverty and odd jobs, and in 1877 became a police reporter in New York, working from an office opposite headquarters on Mulberry Street in the heart of the slums. Using the newly invented magnesium flash, he photographed tenement interiors, lodging houses and alleys at night, and the pictures and his lectures became How the Other Half Lives (1890), which shocked the city into housing reform. Theodore Roosevelt, then police commissioner, called him the best American he knew. His autobiography is The Making of an American.