“Five Cents a Spot” (circa 1890)
As a New Yorker, it is hard to overlook the myriad of homeless people all over the city. Whether you are on the train, at the park or simply walking along the sidewalk, you will most likely encounter one. As a society, we are used to seeing poverty-stricken individuals, but this was not always the case. During the Gilded Age, Jacob Riis opened peoples’ eyes to the vile conditions that the Lower East Side immigrants lived in through his photographs. With the recently discovered technology, people were more than willing to pay to see the poor of their generation. The Museum of the City of New York is now holding an exhibition titled “Jacob A. Riis: Revealing New York’s Other Half”, presenting Riis’ capture of the “other half” of the city.
Jacob Riis’ determination to expose the lives of the poor may be directly correlated to the fact that he was an immigrant himself. Arriving to America without a penny to his name, Riis was staying at a police lodging house where one night his gold locket keepsake was stolen and his dog was clubbed to death. That night, he stated, “cured him of dreaming”. The tough times that he endured motivated him to become a journalist and to “galvanize the public in a campaign to improve housing, health care, education, parks and the assimilation of the nation’s growing immigrant population.”
Riis staged extremely popular slide shows which hundreds of people paid to see. The eye-opening photographs were accompanied by anecdotes, ethnic stereotyping, and Christian moralizing. He would tell his audience that usually consisted of amateur photographers, “the most pitiful victim of city life is not the slum child who dies, but the slum child who lives”.
“Street Arabs in Night Quarters”
In today’s world, when seeing a homeless person asking for money we would most likely pretend we did not see anything. We excuse our behavior by saying, “he would spend the money on drugs or alcohol anyway”. Not much has changed when it comes to the way the poor die. As Riis said, “thousands of forgotten New Yorkers are buried annually in the same unmarked trenches on Hart Island off the Bronx”. Poor people are usually seen as burden to us, but if we change our thinking and consider the possibility that maybe the homeless are not much different from us, we can make a real change in the world. A warm meal or a dollar can change someone’s life.
Side; penniless people are scattered throughout the concrete jungle. These poverty-stricken citizens are littered on the streets begging for change, digging through garbage cans, and sleeping through harsh weather conditions. What does the half that is better off do? Nothing but pass them by. I myself am guilty of this. While sparing a dollar to every homeless person I see is not possible, I wish that I had more sympathy when I ignored them all those times to avoid being late for class.
hours about 100 of his slides. He later titled these lectures “How the Other Half Lives and Dies,” to show just how gruesome this way of life was. But 1890 isn’t so far off from 2015, because poor
So while I sit here typing this blog post on my free computer, to be submitted for a grade at my prestigious university, someone else sleeps on the streets, waiting for enough change to purchase McDonalds’s. Jacob Riis’ photos are truly shocking, but they’re just art to the better half. To the “other half,” these photos are a reality.
Immigrating to a new country can often times be difficult, frustrating, and confusing. The language is foreign, the customs are strange, and even every-day products are different. Without sacrificing some of your previous cultural values and beliefs, it will be difficult to assimilate into the new society. As sad as this process may be, its hardships provide great artistic inspiration for artists such as Zhang Hongtu.
Hongtu’s satirical goal. In this work, Hongtu took an empty Quaker Oats container and painted Mao’s face onto it with a red backdrop. The red background as well as the green hat with a star is symbolic of communism. Quaker Oat’s is one of America’s largest companies. By painting a communist symbol on an American product, Hongtu creates a paradox. It is so absurd that at first glance, I couldn’t help but laugh a bit. Putting the political context aside for a moment, the work also represents a culture clash. Instead of the typical old white male, Hongtu’s Quaker Oats box features a Chinese male. This difference prompts the viewer to question what exactly makes an American, and whether or not that characterization is based upon race.
Recent Comments