Jacob Riis, Racist Huckster?

Our friend refers to his tiny apartment on the top floor of a squat Lower East Side building that has seen better days as “the Jacob Riis penthouse.” And squalid tenements are what most people associate with the Danish-born police reporter and social reform photographer. But a new book points out that he was more than a muckracker. Rediscovering Jacob Riis: Exposure Journalism and Photography in Turn-of-the-Century New York, by Bonnie Yochelson and Daniel Czitrom, highlights “the contradictory elements of Riis’s life and work,” notes Sewell Chan in