- Photographer Jacob A Riis moved to America from Denmark after his marriage proposal was shot down
- Immigrant suffered in extreme poverty before becoming journalist and documenting squalid conditions
- Though now criticized for bias against ethnicities, Riis showed terrible conditions of Irish, Italian and Eastern European tenement neighborhoods to middle class Americans whose outrage would eventually lead to reforms
- Exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York opens on October 14 and will later travel to Washington DC
"Someone who does not know the difference between good and evil is worth nothing." – Miecyslaw Kasprzyk, Polish rescuer of Jews during the Holocaust, New York Times, Jan. 30, 2005
Tuesday, October 6, 2015
The heartbreaking pictures of New York's slums that prompted social reform and earned immigrant photographer praise as the city's 'most useful citizen'
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