Dag Petersson

Jacob A Riis, a young ambitious police reporter for the New York Tribune, closely documented the poverty stricken world of crime and misfortune that infiltrated New York City at the end of the 19th Century. At the time Riis was known for his prolific writing, now however he is considered one of the fathers of photography, with an increasing rise of interest in his work. Riis identified with the socially immobilised day workers, the unemployed, the homeless, the prostitutes and the criminal gangs, all conditioned through his concept of "The Other Half" -- an ideological system based on individual, domestic and social conditions. Dag Petersson has a twofold aim and focus; on the one hand he presents a thorough and well researched monograph on the work of Jacob A Riis, giving a detailed account of his writings, his photographic oeuvre and his ideas. On the other hand, the book is an ambitious attempt at mapping a series of discursive transformations that pave the way for a subsequently dominant mode of thinking about urban pauperisation in the twentieth century.

Jacob A. Riis and the New Image of Tenement Poverty

The Making of the Other Half

Anna Dahlgren

Nina Lager Vestberg

Since its inception in the 19th century, photography has brought to light a vast array of represented subjects. Always situated in some spatial order, photographic representations have been operatively underpinned by social, technical, and institutional mechanisms. Geographically, bodily, and geometrically, the camera has positioned its subjects in social structures and hierarchies, in recognisable localities, and in iconic depth constructions which, although they show remarkable variation, nevertheless belong specifically to the enterprises of the medium. This is the subject of Representational Machines: How photography enlists the workings of institutional technologies in search of establishing new iconic and social spaces. Together, the contributions to this edited volume span historical epochs, social environments, technological possibilities, and genre distinctions. Presenting several distinct ways of producing space photographically, this book opens a new and important field of inquiry for photography research.

Dag Petersson

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