Jacob Riis

How the Other Half Lives, 1890 Jacob Riis took a camera into the tenements of Lower Manhattan, and his 1890 book How the Other Half Lives was illustrated chiefly from his own photographs, Bandit's Roost in Mulberry Bend being the best known. The clearest documented effect came through Theodore Roosevelt: as New York police commissioner he closed the police lodging houses the book exposed, and Riis was active in bringing about tenement and anti-child labour laws. Accounts differ on how directly the book moved Roosevelt, but it made slum conditions hard for comfortable New Yorkers to ignore.