Jacob Riis How The Other Half Lives Summary

Photography is not just used to show an event; photography is used to capture the details, feelings, and thoughts of something – it provides a compelling representation of the author’s view. All this is done by Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives, where the reader is informed about the hideous conditions that the poor had to face in New York City. Riis uses detailed images, facts with statistics, and examples to create an image to the reader of what these people go through in their everyday lives. Using this process, Riis is able to create an important image, which allows the reader to imagine the conditions of these people, make a change to help these poor people, and to promote and inform the public of these conditions, which allows for
The most shocking thing is that there are like two though four people in a bed that would be considered the size of a single bed today! These people are living in a complete pigsty – there are clothes hanged all over the place, the same with pots and pans on tiny shelves attached to the wall, and the huge crates taking up all of the non-bed area. Additionally, the beds are so close together and some of the people do not even have blankets. It was normal for there to be two through three people on the bed and the rest slept on the floor because there were simply not enough beds in the tenement. From the picture, it looks like these people cannot even sleep comfortably as it is too hard to be happy in such horrific conditions. This picture clearly illustrates how unorganized and how unsanitary tenements were and how the people in them were being treated awfully. People had no choices about where else they could live. There were even police that checked for overcrowding in these tenements – people depended on living in these awful tenements, which is completely