How the flashbulb changed

the face of urban poverty

IN OCTOBER OF 1887, a New York paper ran a four-line dispatch announcing that two German scientists, Adolf Miethe and Johannes Gaedicke, had hit upon a new technique for taking photographs in low-light conditions. Photographers had tinkered with artificial lighting since the first daguerreotypes were printed in the 1830s, but almost all the solutions to date had produced unsatisfactory results. (Candles and gaslight were useless, obviously.) Early experiments heated a ball of calcium carbonate — the “limelight” that would illuminate theater productions until the dawn of electric light — but limelit photographs suffered from harsh contrasts and ghostly white faces. But Miethe and Gaedicke had come up with a new solution, the New York paper reported, mixing fine magnesium powder with potassium chlorate, creating a much more stable concoction that allowed high-shutter-speed photographs in low-light conditions. The Germans called it Blitzlicht — literally, “flash light.”

Portrait of Jacob Riis, circa 1890s.

It was hardly a front-page story; the vast majority of New Yorkers ignored it altogether. But the idea of flash photography set off a chain of associations in the mind of one reader — a police reporter and amateur photographer who stumbled across the article while having breakfast with his wife in Brooklyn. His name was Jacob Riis.

Then a twenty-eight-year-old Danish immigrant, Riis would ultimately enter the history books as one of the original muckrakers of the late nineteenth century, the man who did more to expose the squalor of tenement life — and inspire a progressive reform movement — than any other figure of the era. But until that breakfast in 1887, Riis’s attempts to shine light on the appalling conditions in the slums of Manhattan had failed to change public opinion in any meaningful way.

A close confidant of then police commissioner Teddy Roosevelt, Riis had been exploring the depths of Five Points and other Manhattan hovels for years. With over half a million people living in only fifteen thousand tenements, sections of Manhattan were the most densely populated places on the planet. Riis was fond of taking late-night walks through the bleak alleyways on his way back home to Brooklyn from the police headquarters on Mulberry Street. “We used to go in the small hours of the morning,” he later recalled, “into the worst tenements to count noses and see if the law against overcrowding was violated, and the sights I saw there gripped my heart until I felt that I must tell of them, or burst, or turn anarchist, or something.”

Appalled by what he had discovered on his expeditions, Riis began writing about the mass tragedy of the tenements for local papers and national magazines such as Scribner’s and Harper’s Weekly. His written accounts of the shame of the cities belonged to a long tradition, dating back at least to Dickens’s horrified visit to New York in 1840. A number of exhaustive surveys of tenement depravity had been published over the years, with titles like “The Report of the Council of Hygiene and Public Health.” An entire genre of “sunshine and shadow” guidebooks to Five Points and its ilk flourished after the Civil War, offering curious visitors tips on exploring the seedy underbelly of big-city life, or at least exploring it vicariously from the safety of their small-town oasis. (The phrase “slumming it” originates with these tourist expeditions.) But despite stylistic differences, these texts shared one attribute: they had almost no effect on improving the actual lived conditions of those slum dwellers.