HIST 1302

• What other evidence might you want to see if you wanted to determine whether these photographs were an accurate representation of life in the tenements?

• When evaluating whether a historical photograph is useful as evidence, historians consider various questions, including:

• When and where was the photograph was taken?
• Who took the photograph? What was their perspective on the events or people being photographed, and how might that have influenced what they chose to shoot?
• Why was the photograph taken? Might the photographer have wanted to portray a scene in a particular way?
• Under what circumstances was the photograph taken? How might these circumstances have limited or enabled what the photographer captured?
• What technology did the photographer use, and how might that have influenced the image created?

3a. Considering the questions above, why might Riis’s photographs be useful evidence about life in New York’s tenements?

3b. Considering the questions above, what about the photographs might cause you to question whether they are useful evidence about life in New York’s tenements?

• Riis used the image in Document B in his popular slideshow presentation. In his lecture notes, Riis wrote, “On one of my visits to ‘the Bend’ I came across this fellow sitting . . . and he struck me as being such a typical tramp that I asked him to sit still for a minute and I would give him ten cents. That was probably the first and only ten cents that man had earned by honest labor in the course of his life and that was by sitting down at which he was an undoubted expert.”

4a. What was Riis’s attitude toward the man in the picture?

4b. Does this affect whether Document B is good evidence of life in the tenements? Why or why not?

5a. What does Document D reveal about Riis’s attitudes towards Italian immigrants?

5b. Does this passage affect whether Riis’s photographs are good evidence of life in the tenements? Why or why not?