Photography History #17 – Jacob Riis: three boys on a New York doorstep
Updated: 2 days ago
Three boys are asleep between a step and a doorway. There is no bed, no room and no dramatic event. The position of their bodies, the narrow space and the fact that a doorstep has become a place to spend the night are enough to hold the eye.
Jacob Riis made the photograph in New York around 1888. The Library of Congress preserves it under the historical title Street Arabs in “sleeping quarters”. The wording belongs to its period and would not be an appropriate way to describe people today. Keeping it as the archival title matters because it also tells us something about the language and attitudes surrounding the photograph.
A doorstep becomes a sleeping space
The composition is direct. The boys' bodies form a compressed horizontal group, while the wall and doorway close the space around them. There is no heroic gesture and very little visual spectacle. The image becomes powerful because an ordinary architectural element — a threshold — has taken on a different function.
The photograph does not tell us what to think about the boys. It shows, with precision, where and how they were sleeping.
Riis: from police reporter to social reformer
Riis arrived in the United States as a Danish immigrant and later worked as a journalist in New York. The Library of Congress exhibition on Riis describes his sustained attention to housing, poverty, education and immigrant life. He used photography not as an isolated artistic practice, but alongside writing, lectures and reform campaigns.
The Library's account of Riis as a reporter notes that he spent years close to the police beat and to the most severe social conditions in the city. His photographs came from that proximity.
What did photography change?
By the late nineteenth century, photographs were increasingly used in print and projected lectures to make distant social conditions visible to audiences who might otherwise encounter them only through description. Riis's importance lies partly in this act of translation: urban poverty could be seen, not only described.
According to the Library of Congress material on his illustrated lectures, Riis was already presenting projected images of New York tenement life in 1888–1889. Photography became both document and communication.
The limit of the document
The photograph shows three sleeping children. It does not tell us who they were, how long they lived this way or what happened to them later. A photograph can be strong evidence of a situation without becoming a complete biography.
That distinction matters even more now, when a single image can be detached from its context within seconds. Documentary photography is not reliable because it explains everything. It is reliable when we can distinguish what is visible from what we are only assuming.
For me as a photographer, the force of an image like this is not in added drama. It is in showing a real situation precisely enough that looking away becomes more difficult.
A connection to the previous episode
In Photography History #16 – Sojourner Truth, the question was how a person could give a portrait her own message and control. Riis's photograph sits on the other side of that problem: the people shown were represented mainly through the photographer and the institutions that circulated the image. That difference remains one of documentary photography's central ethical questions.
How should we look at it today?
Look again, but do not begin with the boys' faces. Look at the threshold, the wall, the arrangement of the bodies and the amount of physical space available inside the frame. The environment tells us almost as much as the people.
Three questions are useful with any documentary image: What can I actually see? What do I know from the source? What am I adding myself? Keeping those layers separate makes interpretation more accurate.
Sources and image use
Work: Jacob A. Riis, Street Arabs in “sleeping quarters”, New York, c. 1888, printed later. Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ds-00037; LOT 6300.
Rights: The Library of Congress catalogue record gives the rights advisory “No known restrictions on publication.” The digital reproduction used here comes from the Library of Congress collection.
Further sources: Library of Congress – Jacob Riis exhibition; Riis as reporter; Riis and projected lectures.