Jacob A. Riis, Bandit's Roost, 1888

If we are to determine the meaning of a documentary photograph we must begin by establishing the historical context for both the image and its creator. A documentary photographer is an historical actor bent upon communicating a message to an audience. Documentary photographs are more than expressions of artistic skill; they are conscious acts of persuasion. The work of the most accomplished photographers reveals a fervent desire to let images tell a story. Documentarians from Mathew Brady to Dorothea Lange succeeded because they understood the desires of their audience and did not shy from molding their images accordingly. Far from being passive observers of the contemporary scene, documentary photographers were active agents searching for the most effective way to communicate their views.
The following examples show how Jacob Riis used his camera not only to amass a quantity of sociological data but to assert his own assessment of immigrants and tenement life in New York City. Although Jacob Riis did not have an official sponsor for his photographic work, he clearly had an audience in mind when he recorded his dramatic urban scenes. Author of popular newspaper stories and the book How the Other Half Lives, an indictment of the living conditions of immigrant workers in New York City’s Lower East Side neighborhood, Riis was much in demand as a lecturer. He converted many of his images into lantern slides that he used to great effect in his impassioned presentations. He no doubt had his middle-class clientele in mind when composing his pictures. Despite his own immigrant background, Riis’ attitudes mirrored the prejudices of the dominant culture toward “foreigners.” His reports on immigrant life–and his equally famous photographs–were important documents of urban conditions in late nineteenth-century urban America. But they were equally revealing as documents that showed how outsiders often reacted in horror to people who composed “the other half.”
In his famous 1888 photograph Bandit’s Roost (probably taken by an associate in an alley off of Mulberry Street in what is now New York’s Chinatown district), Riis argued that the alley, like the tenement, was a breeding ground for disorder and criminal behavior.

At first glance, the foreground figures in the photograph underscore the aura of menace created by Riis’ caption. Two men appear to guard the alley entrance. Perched on the railing of the right-hand staircase is a third man who has assumed a casual, yet commanding, pose. Perhaps he is the ringleader of this gang. But what of the other ten figures in the image, the women leaning out the windows, the young child in the right background, the three figures on the opposite porch? There is nothing in their demeanor that suggests criminal behavior. If they were indeed part of a notorious gang, why would they be so willing to pose for the camera, especially since members of the police force often accompanied Riis on his photographic forays? How did Riis secure the cooperation of all these individuals? Certainly not by telling them that he wanted a picture of notorious criminals. Is this really a den of iniquity, as Riis would have us believe? In the background of the image, long lines of laundry stretch between the buildings. Riis was fond of saying that “the true line to be drawn between pauperism and honest poverty is the clothesline. With it begins the effort to be clean that is the first and best evidence of a desire to be honest.”