"The Mirror with a Memory"

Jacob Riis' work is said by some to have created some of the most objective photographs  in history to the primitive state of photography as well as the lack of any development of an artistic style in the field. Also, Riis was not using to photographs as his argument but using them as a supplement to his worded claims. The camera had no countless number of settings because just taking the picture was an entire process itself. However, I believe that the innovation of photography created biased photographs of the tenants in Jacob Riis' book How the Other Half Lives.

The expressions of some of the subjects are altered due to their curiosity and admiration of the camera. Riis was one of the first people to travel into the tenements are photograph the residents as they were, meaning that it may well have been the first time those people were getting their picture taken let alone seeing a camera up close. The camera created emotions of uncertainty in the new technology, reflected in the expressions of the people whom he was photographing. In Riis' photograph "Bohemian cigar makers at work in their tenement," the young boy continues his hand work in the picture "although the young boy cannot keep his eyes off the camera" (218). The workers are caught in their environment, however the expressions of the subject, his awe and uncertainty with the invention, adds to a biased tint on the photograph. The obvious interest in the apparatus taking their picture changes the expressions on the subjects' faces, making the photographs free of biases in attempting to catch the tenants in their absolute natural environments.

If Riis was trying to or not, his inclusion or exclusion of photographs and the objects in them creates proclivity. Riis took many many photographs of the tenement housing and its guests, but he could only implement a fraction of them in his finished works. This new technology allowed for the mass production of such pictures. His choosing of which photographs to put in his book is biased because the reader doesn't know what the other hundreds of prints looked like or what those portrayed. Perhaps they were all similar to the ones which appeared in the novel. Maybe a few showed happiness and joy in the expressions of the subjects, indicating that the lower class still held hope and it wasn't the middle class' duty to save the rest of the population in poverty. Also, although Riis attempted to photograph things as they were and show the world the poor life with no strings attached, while taking the photograph, he could only include so much. Whether he focused on a person or their surroundings, this act of changing the field of view created biases based on what the author was and wasn't willing to include in his work. The exclusion and inclusion of various details both in the field of view as well as which prints were used created biases in the work of Riis.

Riis wanted to show readers the lives of the poor without changing any of the environment to bring to readers the truth about the lives of not only the other half, but the lives of the majority of the citizens of the city. He did a very good job at showing the middle and upper class people just how the people living near the Five Points lived. However, no matter how close to the truth Riis wanted to come, he couldn't capture all of it. The modernity of photography created bias photographs in How the Other Half Lives in terms of the subjects' expressions as well as the inclusion and exclusion of certain details.