Figure 1 – Jacon Riis, “Children Sleeping in Mulberry Street, 1890,” from the Wikicommons and in the public domain.

Very much the American counterpart of John Thompson as a documenter of life in the urban slums and crusader for social reform was Jacob August Riis (1849 – 1914).  We see this so vividly in Figure 1 – “Children Sleeping in Mulberry Street, 1890,” which rivals Thompson’s “The Crawlers,” in its raw and gripping social message.  There are three filthy, yet innocent, children, barefoot, and sleeping huddled together above a grating – perhaps some small warmth emanates from beneath.  They are below street level, unseen – or if we see them, turn the other way.  It is as if they are prematurely buried.  They are certainly dead from the perspective of the megalith industrial city – then in its gilded age, that has consumed them.

Riis was a Danish immigrant himself.  He had learned of poverty directly, at one point sleeping on a tombstone in New Jersey, his only food apples that fell fortuitously in his path.  A carpenter by trade, he became a police reporter and this introduced him to the nameless poverty of the slums of inner New York City, acquainting him with the worst places like Mulberry Street where China Town met Little Italy and where police headquarters was.

Riis tried his hand at sketching to illustrate his exposes, but was no good at draughtsmanship; so he turned to photography instead.  Still he was thwarted by the slow lenses and emulsions of the 1880’s.  However, Riis learned of the invention by Germans Adolf Miethe and Johannes Gaedicke of flash photography.  Miether and Gaedicke  mixed magnesium with potassium chlorate and antimony sulfide to add stability.  The was stuffed in a pistol-like device that fired cartridges.   The pistol was both dangerous and threatening to the subject; so Riis soon replaced it with a frying pan in which the powder could be ignited.  The process was simple, albeit frightening.  Remove the lenscap and ignite the flash.  Riis survived and became one of the first Americans to practice flash photography. An eighteen-page article by Riis, entitled How the Other Half Lives, with nineteen of Riis’ photographs rendered as drawings, appeared in the 1889 Christmas edition of the them widely distributed Scribner’s Magazine. This was soon expanded into a book of the same title.

As the images of modern photographer-social reformers testify, Riis work did not eliminate crushing poverty in America.  It did however lead to very serious reform and to the development of America’s progressive movement.  Progress occurs by degrees.  Riis became a life-log friend and colleague of Theodore Roosevelt, himself a campaigner for social reform.  Roosevelt said of him; “Jacob Riis, whom I am tempted to call the best American I ever knew, although he was already a young man when he came hither from Denmark”.

Figure 1 – John Thompson, The Crawlers, 1876-1877, From the Wikipedia posted by catus.man and in the public domain.

This past Wednesday, I posted about John Thompson’s important photography about poverty and namelessness in Victorian England and I found myself very much haunted by the picture shown there, and reposted here as Figure 1, entitled, “The Crawlers.”  What exactly were “The Crawlers,” what was the miserable story of the old woman shown in the picture?

To find out, I found a copy of John Thompson’s, “Victorian London Street Life.”  My first thought was that a crawler must be a beggar, the people at your feet  begging pennies.  But the despair is worse than that,  In Thompson’s own words:

“Huddled together on the workhouse steps in Short’s garden, those wrecks of humanity, the crawlers of St. Giles may be seen both day and night seeking mutual warmth and mutual consolation in their extreme misery.  As a rule they are old women reduced by vice and poverty to that degree of wretchedness that destroys even the energy to beg.  They have not the strength to struggle for bread and prefer starvation to the activity that an ordinary mendicant must display.”

In other words they are beggars, who no longer have the will to beg.  We learn that the mother of the child shown was such a crawler, but that she managed to find employment and, of course, her worked demanded that she be absent most of the day.  So she has trusted her baby to the old woman, who does it in exchange for a bit of tea and bread.  Sustenance that doesn’t always come.  And we learn also that the baby has a cough and we are left to wonder whether it will survive.  We already know the answer.

Like Dickens, Thompson’s goal was to raise the awareness of the English Middle Class.  Even a hundred and fifty years later, he succeeds brilliantly.  Next, I would like to discuss the person and work of the person who raised the same banner in America, Jacob Riis.

Today’s post is for those of you adicted to Masterpiece Theater’s miniseries “Mr. Selfridge.”  Follow this link to see vintage footage of the great and legendary ballerina Anna Pavlova perform her signature piece “The Dying Swan,” which was choreographed in 1905 by Mikhail Fokine.  The actual film was originally silent.  However, it is most often shown dubbed with Camille Saint-Saëns’  “The Swan” from “The Carnival of the Animals (Le carnaval des animaux)”.  Her last words were reported to be “Get my ‘Swan’ costume ready.”

Figure 1 – Nikola Tesla in his laboratory. From the Wikicommons and in the public domain.

Among the great “scientist in the laboratory” photographs is the image of Figure 1, showing the great inventor Nicola Tesla (1856-1943) in his Colorado Springs laboratory.  He sits in deadpan concentration at his reading undaunted by the tremendous (multiexposure) bolts of electricity flashing above him.  It is just what Tesla wanted to portray, the safety of high powered alternating current as opposed to the dangers of high powered direct current.

Tesla was the ultimate showman.  In that respect he is accurately portrayed by David Bowie in the film, “The Prestige,” starring Hugh Jackman and Scarlett Johansonn.  This film is one of my personal favorites, and I recommend it to anyone who likes their period pieces with just a tad of science fiction.

Nikola Tesla was a Serbian-American inventor, physicist, and futurist.  He came to America in 1884 to work with Edison.  However, he soon found his own financial backers and broke with Edison to set up his own laboratory and company.  He sold the rights to his AC induction motor patent to George Westinghouse and served as a consultant for Westinghouse in the development of alternating current, which indeed is a safer form of electrical energy.  Tesla was well known for his high-voltage, high-frequency power experiments in New York and Colorado Springs.  Beyond electrical power he made major contributions to radio transmission, radio control, and the development of practical X-ray instruments.  He was truly one of the intellectual giants of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

I can never resist a photograph of Mark Twain; so I include below Figure 2, which is an image of Mark Twain in Tesla’s laboratory in 1894.  I believe that what we are looking at is Twain igniting a phosphor coated gas discharge lamp by touching it because he is transmitting high frequency alternating current, from a Tesla coil, over the surface of his body.  In a modern sense the picture is reminiscent of the famous candle lit paintings of sixteenth/seventeenth century French artist Georges de La Tour (1593-1652).  I love the obscure image of Tesla looking on in amusement and the spherical flash of light creating a sphere on the left.

Mark Twain in Tesla’s laboratory. Originally from The Century Magazine 1894 from the Wikicommons and in the public domain.

Figure 1 – John Thompson, Flower Girls in Front of Concvent Garden, 1877. From the Wikicommons and in the public domain.

John Thomson (1837 – 1921) was one of the great Scottish photographers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  In his early career he gained notariety as a travel photographer and was one of the first photographers to document the far east.  In his later career he became a society photographer in Mayfair and was awarded the royal warrant.But what he is most remembered for today is his partnership with radical journalist Adolphe Smith.  The two collaborated in the production of a monthly, Street Life in London, between 1876 – 1877, which was subsequently published in book form in 1878.  The project was to document London street life, the lives of the people who scratched out there living invisible and just beneath the eyes of the middle and upper classes.  These were images of chimney sweeps, and flower girls, and peddlars.

Figure 2 – John Thompson, The Crawlers, 1876-1877, From the Wikipedia posted by catus.man and in the public domain.

These powerful images represent one of the first great social commentary photographic series.  and served to create a visual resonance to the stories of Charles Dickens.  Life was not rosey on the streets of London. Take, for instance, figure 1, which shows flower “girls” in front of Convent Garden.  They are not Eliza Doolittle. In Smith and Thompson’s own words:

“When death takes one of the group away, a child has generally been reared to follow in her parents’ footsteps; and the” beat” in front of the church is not merely the property of its present owners, it has been inherited from previous generations of flower-women. Now and then a stranger makes her appearance, probably during the most profitable season, but as a rule the same women may be seen standing on the spot from year’ s end to year’s end, and the personages of the photograph are well known to nearly all who are connected with the market…”

Truly, in creating Street Life in London, John Thompson defined the profession of photojournalism.  The powerful images that chronicle social injustice in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have their roots, and owe their essence to these photographs by John Thompson.

Figure 1 – Marie and Pierre Curie in their Laboratory. From the Wikicommons and in the public domain.

As classic examples of the photographic genre “Scientists at work in their laboratories,” I offer up, first a picture of Marie (1867-1934) and Pierre Curie (1859-1906) in their laboratory (Figure 1) and then a later picture of Marie Curie alone (Figure 2).  The second most likely dates after Pierre’s untimely death.

Here the camera serves to chronicle, to capture a moment in time, and to place that moment in its historical context.  These images serve three purposes.  First, they are portraits of the Curies.  Second, they recorded, and now show us, what a physics laboratory was like at the dawn of the twentieth century,  And third, pershaps most significantly, since they were at some level posed, they show us the Curies in the way that they wanted people to see them.  Image for public figures was as important then as it is now.  Pierre looks more than a bit fatherly.  And Marie appears demure, not to mention gorgeous in her younger days.  What we see of her is her dedication to science, to family, and to country.  Despite her taking on a then masculine endeavour, she violates no social norms.

Figure 2 – A later laboratory picture of Marie Curie. From the Wikicommons and in the public domain.

It is important to mention what remarkable people the Curies were.  They were physical chemists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  Chemistry text books began with the essential definition of an element as an immutable substance.  You could change its physical form.  You could melt or vaporize it.  You could react it with other elements.  But you could never turn it into another element.  But then the Curies’ measurements showed something very strange, elements could change into other elements.They were brilliant experimentalists.  Look around at the scientific instruments that they used.  Many of them were homebuilt and were the most accurate in the world.  They checked and rechecked their calculations.  But in the end, they opened up their minds and as scientists they embraced the epiphany before them.  And they opened the door to a true understanding of the physical nature of the universe.  In this regard, they are the architype of “the scientists.”

In ending, I’d like to draw your attention to a website that chronicles the arrival of these two Parisian dandies, or so they must have seemed to American westerners, on their arrival in Telluride, Colorado to buy dirt.