The impoverished: a century apart in pictures.

• Author: Nolan, Leslie

During the late 19th century, social reformer and journalist Jacob Riis exposed the misery of slum life through his poignant, often shocking pictures. In contrasting his photos with the works of contemporary photographers, have things really changed that much?

JACOB A. RIIS was the first reformer to convey effectively to a wide public the unacceptable nature of living conditions endured by the urban poor. Riis, considered America's first photojournalist, used his camera to arouse the public about poverty in late-19th-century New York. Riis' pictures were even more powerful than his written words. His use of the relatively new medium of photography gave his message unprecedented power.

In 1870, 21-year-old Riis arrived in New York as a Danish immigrant, one among thousands of the poor, friendless, and unskilled. Like so many, he frequently spent nights in police station lodging houses, then the shelters of last resort. He soon left the city to work at an assortment of rural jobs, but returned in 1877 to find steady employment as a police reporter for the Tribune (1877-88) and the Evening Sun (1888-99). New York's police headquarters was then on Mulberry Street, in the heart of the Lower East Side slum district. As Riis became familiar with the squalid living conditions of the area, he began to employ his journalistic skills to convey his revulsion to the public.

From 1877 to 1887, Riis wrote and lectured, stressing his view that the poor were victims, rather than makers of their fate, a revolutionary concept then emerging among social reformers. Despite his considerable rhetorical skills and instructional use of statistics, architectural plans, and maps, he was hard-pressed to communicate the elemental shock he felt on his nightly sorties through the worst slums.

Later, in his 1902 autobiography, The Making of an American, he expressed his feelings: "It was upon my midnight trips with the sanitary police that the wish kept cropping up in me that there were some way of putting before the people what I saw there. A drawing might have done it, but I cannot draw, never could.... But, anyway, a drawing would not have been evidence of the kind I wanted. We used to go in the small hours of the morning into the worst tenements to count noses and see if the law against overcrowding was violated, and the sights I saw there gripped my heart until I felt that I must tell of them, or burst, or turn anarchist, or something. `A man may be a man even in a...