PERSON
Jacob Riis
Danish-American social reformer and photojournalist (1849–1914) whose How the Other Half Lives (1890) extended Engels's method of moral witness to the tenements of late-nineteenth-century New York.
Jacob Riis was a Danish-American journalist, photographer, and social reformer whose 1890 book How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York brought Engels's method of documentary social witness to American audiences and helped catalyze the Progressive Era's housing and labor reforms. Working as a police reporter for the New-York Tribune, Riis covered the Mulberry Bend district and its surrounding tenements, and his combination of investigative journalism, statistical documentation, and the new technology of flash photography produced a body of work that made visible what the aggregate statistics of New York's explosive economic growth had concealed. His method — entering the conditions, documenting them with specific precision, refusing to let the aggregate prosperity of the city absorb the specific suffering of its tenement dwellers — exemplifies the tradition the Engels Simulation identifies as moral witness.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Riis's significance for the moral witness tradition lies in his methodological innovations as much as in his political impact. He was