Kimberly Little On Progressive-era Photography

摘要

An old rear tenement, clearly overcrowded, with laundry hanging from the porch: the scene could be straight from Jacob Riis's seminal 1890 work, How the Other Half Lives, perhaps another angle of Riis's "Old Rear-Tenement in Roosevelt Street." Riis was not the photographer, however, and it is in the details of this image that one may begin to understand an alternative history of Progressive-era photography. While misery, even the appearance of death, plagued the people in Riis's hook, just as deterioration and dirt pervaded his environment, this photograph, titled "A Back Yard on North Ninth Street," and a second one, appearing later in this essay, revealed a different vision of the tenements; the photographs offered hope. Their publication also reflects the broader gender roles that some Progressives adopted in their fight to reform the city (see Figure 1).