8. Jacob Riis’ Lantern Slide Box

Image from Museum of the City of New York

Jacob Riis died in 1914, but his photographic collection was only discovered in the 1940s in the attic of Riis’ home in Richmond Hill, Queens. With this exhibition, Yochelson hopes to reposition the narrative around Riis, which in the recent period has focused on the photographs left behind. Riis himself did not put particular stock in the images, apart from being a tool for his larger social reform initiatives, and left the collection behind himself when he moved.

In the 1940s, Riis’ son, Roger Williams Riis, was encouraged by the fine art photographer Alexander Alland to return to the house to retrieve the collection, which contained negatives, lantern slides, and prints. Roger Riis donated it to the Museum of the City of New York, and a subsequent exhibition at the museum would come to define Riis’ legacy – as a fine art photographer. Yochelson tells us, Alland “brought Riis to public attention as a photographer with a show at the Museum of the City of New York in 1948 by taking Riis’ negatives and making beautiful prints. He kind of twisted our idea of Riis as a photographer to a mid-20th century idea of what a photographer is, which is basically an artist.”