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'

  • 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

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