Hell's Kitchen with Sebastopol

1870–1914 · Workplace

New York City

January 1888

Buys his own camera

The first team soon tires of the late hours, and Riis's assistants prove lazy, one of them dishonest. On Nagle's advice Riis pays $25 for a 4×5 box camera, plate holders, a tripod and developing and printing equipment, and tries them out at the potter's field cemetery on Hart Island: two exposures, badly overexposed but successful.

12 February 1888

First report on his night photographs in the Sun

The Sun publishes Riis's unsigned article on pictures of the city's crime and misery by night and day, illustrated with twelve line drawings after the photographs. It presents the material as the foundation of a lecture, “The Other Half: How It Lives and Dies in New York”, to be given at church and Sunday school exhibitions.

1888–1889

Lantern-slide lectures and new acquaintances

An editor at Harper's New Monthly Magazine says he likes the photographs but not the writing, and Riis decides to speak to the public directly: Adolph Schauffler and Josiah Strong arrange a lecture at the Broadway Tabernacle, and a Health Department clerk, W. L. Craig, becomes his partner. The lantern-slide lectures make little money but bring Riis together with Charles Henry Parkhurst and an editor of Scribner's Magazine, who invites him to submit an illustrated article.

Christmas 1889

The article “How the Other Half Lives” in Scribner's Magazine

An eighteen-page article by Riis, illustrated with line drawings made from his photographs, appears in the Christmas 1889 issue of the magazine. Its publication brings an invitation to expand the material into an entire book.

1890

The book “How the Other Half Lives” is published

He writes “How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York” at night, reporting for the New York Sun by day and lecturing in the evenings. It reuses the line drawings from the magazine article and adds seventeen halftone reproductions of photographs — the first extensive use of halftones in a book; it sells well, though some reviewers fault the author for oversimplifying and exaggerating (other accounts give 1891 as the year of publication).