1890sPrimary sourceWell documented
Photography and Social Reform
On the timeline · around 1890s ·
What happened
As cheaper cameras and flash powder made photography more flexible, reformers turned the camera into a weapon for social change. In New York, the journalist Jacob Riis photographed the squalid tenements of the poor for his 1890 book How the Other Half Lives, using flash to capture dark slum interiors and shock the public into action.
Why it matters
Riis is a forerunner of modern photojournalism and documentary photography. He proved that photographs could not just record the world but expose injustice and drive reform — a tradition later carried on by the Depression-era photographers of the Farm Security Administration.