the Woodburytype), which allowed the combination of text and photographic images in books and periodicals. Moreover, the rediscovery of his photographic corpus in the 1940s (what is now known as the Jacob A. Riis Collection of the Museum of the City of New York) and the dramatically sudden way in which Riis was integrated into the history of the medium as a documentary photographer through exposure by authors such as Alexander Alland and Beaumont Newhall, among others (during the rise of illustrated press or pictorials and photographic projects, such as that of the Farm Security Administration (FSA), which marked a milestone in documentary photography whose photographers longed to find historical precedents for their work), has contributed to the generation of a controversial view of Riis, whose status needs to be reviewed in the light of the latest research, which indicates alterations or manipulations of the original images in order to present them in artistic circles, and errors of attribution due to Riis’s dual role of photographer and collector. Thus, this essay also examines the historiographical process that Riis’s work has undergone so as to recover his importance as a pioneer of documentary photography of the slums.
Keywords American Memory; American Studies; American Prose Literature -19th century- History and criticism; Americanization; Candid Photography; City Planning; Crane, Stephen, 1871-1900. Maggie, a girl of the streets. “An Experiment in Misery”; Cultural Studies; Documentary Photography; Muckraker Journalism; Naturalism in Literature; New York City and Society; New York City Tenements; Photographic Technology; Photojournalism; Printing Processes; Puritanism; Realism in Literature and Photography; Regional/Local History; Riis, Jacob A. (Jacob August), 1849-1914; Slums; Social Documentary Photography; Social Reformism; Urban Studies; Urbanization; Visual Communication.
Las dos mitades de Jacob Riis
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