Light in the Dark Room: Photography and Loss Book

Let me make it clear that I am reviewing the 1966 Harper Torchbook edition, with a helpful introduction and notes by social historian Roy Lubove (1934-1995). The Torchbook reproduces the 1901 first edition, includes the original illustrations, and has comparatively wide margins and large print.

Lubove calls Jacob Riis (1849-1914) a sort of "settlement worker without portfolio." Today he is best known for his early photojournalistic exposé of New York slums, How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York (1890).

Riis published the chapters of The Making of an American in three different periodicals, a circumstance that partially explains the meandering feel of much of the book. Nevertheless, it's hard not enjoy what an original reviewer called Riis's "frankness and virility" in describing emigration from his beloved Denmark and his gradual rise to influence as a New York police reporter. (How many immigrants could have developed enough fluency in an adopted language to make a living writing in it within eight years?)

Riis's autobiography is free of the bloviating cant typical of his own day (not to mention ours); and while it is easy to confer a condescending smile on Riis's belief in the power of playgrounds and flowers to make people better, his true love for real human beings, and his earnestness in trying to improve their lives'especially those of children'will dissipate many a cynical thought. The story of Riis's courtship and marriage is so impossibly romantic that a novelist could never have made it believable; and many disparate thoughts dance in Riis's head, including evangelical Christianity and the Social Gospel. Riis hated theory, and for that reason, his life and enthusiasms are charming if not necessarily logical. As Lubove writes, this autobiography "will always be the appealing personal testament of a talented, vivacious reporter who never lost the child's sense of discovery."