9:37 p.m. | Updated Thanks to all who participated in the conversation tonight. If you missed the live chat feel free to leave a comment below throughout the week. Thanks.
With the election of Bill de Blasio as the next mayor of New York City, it seemed a fitting time to read Jacob Riis’s pioneering work of social criticism, “How the Other Half Lives.” Published by Scribner’s in 1890, Riis’s book, sought to enlighten the out-of-touch upper classes on the horrors of tenement life in New York. Riis, a Danish immigrant, had been working as a police reporter for The New York Tribune, a job that gave him intimate familiarity with Mulberry Bend, a vestige of Five Points, the most notorious slum in the city. Five Points had been partially razed and partially rehabilitated as a result of the Draft Riots of 1863.
But obviously there was plenty of misery to document. Riis’s opus, which famously includes pictures he took, was written with none of the detachment or objectivity that journalistic explorations of poverty are typically given today. The book is full of his harsh judgments of the Italians (the Italian’s “ignorance and unconquerable suspicion of strangers dig the pit into which he falls”), the Irish (“more unruly” in Riis’s view than the Italians), Jews and the Chinese, while he remains surprisingly less critical of blacks and women. (One of the most interesting data points in the book is a chart looking at tenement rents for white vs. black tenants, which shows rents in some cases lower for African-Americans because they were considered more desirable tenants than immigrants.)
Riis’s book was an immediate success and it had an enormous impact, spurring reform. Can contemporary work in this vein have the same sort of impact? How radically can it change people’s thinking? Some of you may have read “Invisible Child,” the five-part series in The Times last week on the life of a homeless family in Brooklyn. The photographer Ruth Fremson, who worked on that series, will weigh in on the project and its relationship to Riis’s legacy.
Here’s what she told me in an email about Riis’s impact on her own work: “Before I even knew what photojournalism was, I was inclined to correct whatever I perceived to be injustice, so Riis’ work resonated strongly for me when I first was introduced to it. Instead of being repelled by the dark subject matter I was fascinated by how images could be historical documents, instruments of change, proof of injustice and art objects simultaneously.”
Read our discussion of Riis’s work in the comments section below from Dec. 16.
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6:51 p.m. Some of you may be interested in other remarks from our photographer Ms. Fremson about her experience essentially doing a Riis-like project today. Here was our conversation:
GB: You spent well over a year photographing Dasani and her family, could you talk a little bit about the emotional repercussions about moving back and forth between her world and your own?
RF: This is a very perceptive question Ginia and yes, there were emotional repercussions covering Dasani. It was jarring to say the least and there were many times that I would return to my comfortable apartment and wonder at the randomness of birth – how was it that I was so lucky to be born to my circumstances?
Journalists are skilled at adapting to different environments quickly but I hadn’t before spent as much time on one project or gotten as close to my subjects. Even with the professionally acquired ability to maintain perspective it nags at me to know how they, and so many more like them, are living. I don’t think this is a bad thing. I would be more disturbed if I were numb to other peoples’ plight.
GB: In your view and based on all you’ve seen what could we be doing both at the level of policy and as individuals to improve the lives of the other half, today?
RF: It seems to me that everyone should be concerned about affordable housing even if only for their own selfish reasons: I remember how many businesses couldn’t operate fully or how the populations in high-end apartment buildings increased during the transit strike a few years ago when service workers (waiters, busboys, nannies, housekeepers, janitors etc) were unable to make it to work. In some cases, nannies and housekeepers stayed with their employers for the duration of the strike.
If housing remains out of reach and people are forced to move further and further away from the city there will be a lot of people who rely on service workers scrambling just to keep their own lives running smoothly.
I remember working on a story in Nantucket a number of years ago – the local hardware store there owned a small airplane and they would fly their employees back and forth from the mainland to work as they could not afford the rents on the island. Is this the direction we are headed in?
The Lower East Side is the novel’s milieu, and it takes as its subject the blunt traumas inflicted by the neighborhood’s transition to a playground for mixologists, 22-year-olds, developers and the Great Acquirers. The plot gets going around a mugging and murder but the theme metaphorically at least is rape — the intimate violence perpetrated on familiar places that imbues them with a feeling of vacancy even as they are thronged. Wistfulness for the way things were in New York before pedestrian plazas and Pinkberrys and hedge funds has become a thriving posture but Mr. Price isn’t so much a nostalgist as he is a fatalist. Perhaps now, more so than when the book was first published — after the crash and the highly discriminate recovery and failure of moral correction that followed — there is comfort to be found in Mr. Price’s choice of condemnation over eulogy. 
