New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1890. First edition. A Very Good copy. Complete, with eighteen black and white plates after photographs, further in-text illustrations. Original publisher's cloth-backed pictorial boards, spine lettered in gilt (one of two binding variants, no priority known). Binding a little toned and foxed, with extremities slightly frayed. Neat contemporary ink ownership inscriptions of one Emma Burroughs of Glover, Vermont to front pastedown and free endpaper. Contents sporadically foxed, front hinge a little tender.

Jacob A. Riis (1849 - 1914) was a social reformer, journalist, and photography pioneer. His greatest work was How the Other Half Lives, a photobook documenting the squalid conditions of the poor in the tenements of New York City. The work had a wide-ranging impact on readers, Riis' fellow journalists and photographers, and on the modern New York cityscape. Theodore Roosevelt read the work in 1894, while serving as the New York City Police Commissioner, and enlisted Riis' help in reforming living conditions in the tenements. The result was the New York Tenement House Act, which placed requirements on living space, ventilation, and fire safety; the act inspired a statewide law and similar reforms across the country.

"One of the most important photobooks ever published, How the Other Half Lives represents the first extensive use of halftone photographic reproductions in a book. It is the beginning, not of a photographic genre, but a photographic attitude, an ethos – humanist documentary photography – in which the photographic social document is employed to bear critical witness to what is going on in the world" (Parr & Badger, The Photobook, p. 53). Very Good (Item #8326)