San Antonio College Library

Photographs from the Riis family's private collection (later given to the Museum of the City of New York) on the immigrant slums of New York City. Captions come from Riis' own writings. Alland can be credited somewhat for reviving historical interest in Riis' photographs.

In this compelling work, Keith Gandal reveals how the slum in nineteenth-century America, long a topic for sober moral analysis, became in the 1890s an unprecedented source of spectacle, captured in novels, newspapers, documentary accounts, and photographs. Reflecting a change in the middle-class vision of the poor, the slum no longer drew attention simply as a problem of social conditions and vice but emerged as a subject for aesthetic, ethnographic,...