Before publishing his pioneering book How the Other Half Lives—a photojournalistic investigation into the poverty of New York’s tenement houses, home to three quarters of the city’s population—Jacob Riis (1849-1914) spent his first years in the United States as an immigrant and itinerant laborer, barely surviving on his carpentry skills until he landed a job as a muckraking reporter. These early experiences provided Riis with an understanding of what it was like to be poor in the immigrant communities that populated New York’s slums, and it was this empathy that would shine through in his iconic photos. With Rediscovering Jacob Riis, art historian Bonnie Yochelson and historian Daniel Czitrom place Jacob Riis’s images in historical context even as they expose a clear sightline to the present. In the first half of their book, Czitrom explores Riis’s reporting and activism within the gritty specifics of Gilded Age New York: its new immigrants, its political machines, its fiercely competitive journalism, its evangelical reformers, and its labor movement. In delving into Riis’s intellectual education and the lasting impact of How the Other Half Lives, Czitrom shows that though Riis argued for charity, not sociopolitical justice, the empathy that drove his work continues to inspire urban reformers today. In the second half of the book, Yochelson describes for the first time Riis’s photographic practice: his initial reliance on amateur photographers to take the photographs he needed, his own use of the camera, and then his collecting of photographs by professionals, who by 1900 were documenting social reform efforts for government agencies and charities. She argues that while Riis is rightly considered a revolutionary in the history of photography, he was not a photographic artist. Instead, Riis was a writer and lecturer who first harnessed the power of photography to affect social change. As staggering inequality continues to be an urgent political topic, this book, illustrated with nearly seventy of Riis’s photographs, will serve as a stunning reminder of what has changed, and what has not.

Rediscovering Jacob Riis: Exposure Journalism and Photography in Turn-of-the-Century New York

Arts & Photography

Yochelson, Bonnie

Czitrom, Daniel

Individual Artists

University of Chicago Press

The definitive study of the images made by a pioneer journalist and photographer who passionately advocated for America’s urban poor Danish-born Jacob A. Riis (1849–1914) found success in America as a reporter for the New York Tribune, first documenting crime and later turning his eye to housing reform. As tenement living conditions became unbearable in the wake of massive immigration, Riis and his camera captured some of the earliest, most powerful images of American urban poverty. This important publication is the first comprehensive study and complete catalogue of Riis’s world-famous images, and places him at the forefront of early-20th-century social reform photography. It is the culmination of more than two decades of research on Riis, assembling materials from five repositories (the Riis Collection at the Museum of the City of New York, the Library of Congress, the New-York Historical Society, the New York Public Library, and the Museum of South West Jutland, Denmark) as well as previously unpublished photographs and notes. In this handsome volume, Bonnie Yochelson proposes a novel thesis—that Riis was a radical publicist who utilized photographs to enhance his arguments, but had no great skill or ambition as a photographer. She also provides important context for understanding how Riis’s work would be viewed in turn-of-the-century New York, whether presented in lantern slide lectures or newspapers.

Jacob A. Riis: Revealing New York's Other Half: A Complete Catalogue of His Photographs

Photography & Video

Yale University Press

Karl Struss (1886-1981) was a master of both still and motion picture photography. A native of New York City, he first studied photography with Clarence White and soon mastered the tenets of pictorialism. Alfred Stieglitz featured his work in a 1910 exhibition and a 1912 issue of Camera Work and invited Struss to become a member - as it turned out, the last member - of the Photo-Secession. New York to Hollywood: The Photography of Karl Struss surveys this consummate artist's long career with the camera, including his pioneering color photography using the autochrome process, his photographic explorations of New York and Europe before War World I, his images of Hollywood stars and western landscapes and seascapes, and his motion picture work. Essayist Bonnie Yochelson surveys his early work in New York, Richard Koszarski his career in cinematography, and Barbara McCandless examines how Struss' background and early work not only led him to Hollywood but greatly contributed to the artistry of the still-young film industry there. John and Susan Edwards Harvith, who rediscovered Struss' work in the 1970's and interviewed him at length in his later years, round out the portrait of both the man and the artist.

New York to Hollywood: The Photography of Karl Struss

Koszarski, Richard

McCandless, Barbara

Univ of New Mexico Pr

Karl Struss (1886-1981) was a master of both still and motion picture photography. A native of New York City, he first studied photography with Clarence White and soon mastered the tenets of Pictorialism. Alfred Stieglitz featured his work in a 1910 exhibition and a 1912 issue of Camera Work. Struss was also a pioneering commercial photographer, one of the first to produce photographs for magazine illustration. 
After enlisting in the army during World War I, he decided not to return to New York but instead headed west, to Hollywood, where he began a new career in film, making movie stills and publicity portraits and then doing motion picture photography. His pictorial talents earned him the first Academy Award for cinematography for Sunrise (1927). 
New York to Hollywood surveys this consummate artist's long career with the camera. John and Susan Edwards Harvith, who rediscovered Struss's pictorialist work in the 1970s and interviewed him at length in his later years, round out the portrait of both the man and the artist.

Amon Carter Museum

Iconic images of the city from one of the masters of photography collected for the first time in a charming homage to lost New York. Here is "The City of Ambition"—the New York that inspires dreams, the Gotham of the early twentieth century, when grand skyscrapers sprouted everywhere amid columns of steam. Alfred Stieglitz—the legendary art impresario and husband of Georgia O’Keeffe—forged a paean to his native city, finding inspiration on the streets, from the harbor ferry, and in the high-rise views. In her essay, respected art historian Bonnie Yochelson places Stieglitz’s work within the context of the burgeoning commercial world around him and other artists of the period. Stieglitz witnessed a key period in New York’s history when the city suddenly transformed into a modern metropolis. As a child, he grew up in an upper Fifth Avenue brownstone still surrounded by empty lots and dirt roads. Naturally, he was fascinated by the monumental buildings rising around him, and you can sense his wonder in these images. Among the classic buildings he so artfully captured here are the (now demolished) Madison Square Gardens, the Flatiron, Rockefeller Center, the Waldorf Astoria, the Chrysler, and the Empire State. His images formed archetypes that would go on to shape the imagination of generations. This intimate volume makes for a beautiful souvenir of timeless New York, a city of striving and dreaming.

Alfred Stieglitz New York

Skira/Rizzoli

A provocative new illustrated history of the famed early chronicler of New York's immigrant poor, seen here as an opportunistic, camera-toting social reformer whose legacy lives on. "I don't remember my mother or my aunts and uncles talking of their father as a photographer....In his letters—I have read most of them—he never mentions a camera."—J. Riis Owre (grandson of Jacob Riis) More than ninety years after his death, Jacob Riis maintains a stubbornly persistent hold on the American imagination. Remembered as a pioneering photographer, he was the first to document the state of New York's slums, publicizing in haunting photographs the plight of the urban poor at the height of European immigration to the city. But Riis confessed to being "no good at all as a photographer" and in recent years has been disparaged for racist views and political opportunism. In Rediscovering Jacob Riis, Bonnie Yochelson and Daniel Czitrom address the complex legacy of the pioneering social reformer. In a work of highly original scholarship, they reclaim Riis from the art camp, relocating him in the field of social and cultural history. Their provocative new book reveals Riis to be an inspired self-promoter who, although neither an original thinker nor a serious photographer, nevertheless framed the discussion of urban poverty in terms still relevant today. Extensively illustrated with Riis's images, Rediscovering Jacob Riis is revisionist history at its best, as appealing to photographers, journalists, and social historians as it is to the general reader.

Rediscovering Jacob Riis: The Reformer, His Journalism, and His Photographs

New Press

This monograph is dedicated to the career of Esther Bubley, one of America's leading photojournalists. Bubley's mentor was Roy Stryker, for whom she worked at the Office of War Information in Washington, D.C., and at Standard Oil in New York City. Under Stryker, Bubley learned to document the spectacle of modern industry and the lives of ordinary people in a fast-changing world. From the early 1940s to the late 1960s, she also freelanced for national magazines, producing 40 photo-essays for Life, a dozen more for the Ladies' Home Journal's famous series, How America Lives and numerous projects for non-profit organizations and major corporations alike. At a time when career options for women were limited, Bubley rose to the top of an overwhelmingly male-dominated field. The 5,000-word essay by photo historian Bonnie Yochelson explains the working life of a photojournalist during the pre-television era when picture magazines dominated the national media. In collaboration with Yochelson, Tracy Schmid, archivist of the Bubley estate, and Jean Bubley, executor of the estate, contribute original research and interviews with Esther's colleagues and contemporaries, highlighting her achievements and accomplishments. The book includes 75 of her finest images as well as magazine layouts, which illustrate how Bubley's photographs were originally seen by millions of Americans. While Bubley's talent was well recognized at the time--her work was shown in three Museum of Modern Art exhibitions--she was not a celebrity and did little to promote herself. Having received far less attention than she deserves, this book aims to introduce a selection of her best work to a wider audience. Bonnie Yochelson is a photographic historian and freelance curator. In 2001, she co-curated Esther Bubley: American Photo-Journalist, at the UBS/PaineWebber Art Gallery in collaboration with the Bubley archive and estate. She is the author of Berenice Abbott: Changing New York, The Complete WPA Project (1997) and is co-author of Rediscovering Jacob Riis (2005).

Esther Bubley: On Assignment

Schmid, Tracy

Aperture

In 1986 when Anders Goldfarb (b. 1954 in Brooklyn, lived and worked in Brooklyn, NY) moved to Greenpoint, he was a young photographer with a master of fine arts degree from State University of New York at New Paltz. In moving to Williamsburg, he joined a growing number of young artists seeking the low rents of what was then a declining neighborhood of light industrial buildings and working-class residences. Working with black and white film, and a medium format Rolleiflex camera, Goldfarb began photographing in 1987 in Williamsburg and Greenpoint, riding his bike around the area and looking for the peculiar beauty of sidings, peeling paint and razor wire. Goldfarb's photographs provide a valuable historical record of these neighborhoods prior to their demolition and gentrification. His subjects are metaphors for loss and vulnerability and distill moments in time that are destined for demise.

Anders Goldfarb: Passed Remains: Williamsburg/Greenpoint 1987 – 2007

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Yochelson, Bonnie. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Yochelson, Bonnie

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Yochelson, Bonnie. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Rediscovering Jacob Riis: Exposure Journalism and Photography in Turn-of-the-Century New York

Jacob A. Riis: Revealing New York's Other Half: A Complete Catalogue of His Photographs

New York to Hollywood: The Photography of Karl Struss

New York to Hollywood: The Photography of Karl Struss

Alfred Stieglitz New York

Rediscovering Jacob Riis: The Reformer, His Journalism, and His Photographs

Esther Bubley: On Assignment

Anders Goldfarb: Passed Remains: Williamsburg/Greenpoint 1987 – 2007