Jacob Riis - Analyse und Interpretation ausgewählter Fotografien

Analyse und Interpretation ausgewählter Fotografien

Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1, Martin Luther University (Anglistik/Amerikanistik), course: American Photography, language: English, abstract: This paper is concentrated on the work of Jacob Riis. He was one famous police reporter at the end of the 19th century. He dedicated his work to the immigrants of New York. At this time the city was overcrowded by people from all over the world and it was the city's problem to care for them in a proper way. Riis noticed this abuse and wanted to fight against it. Therefore he took pictures of the immigrants living in bad surroundings to convince people of the middle class that something needs to be changed. This paper is going to analyze three of his pictures with special attention to Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright's book An Introduction to Visual Culture: Practices of Looking. This book deals with visual culture and explains how people use and understand pictures. It refers to all kind of media such as photography, painting, film and television. Images are analysed under certain aspects. The book raises the question of how meaning originates or how the viewer constructs meaning. It refers to the principle of the gaze or spectatorship. It looks behind the structures of representation and the subject, and it refers to the Other as well as to voyeurism. This paper will look exactly at these four aspects, explains them and tries then to connect them with Riis' photographs. But before one can take a look at Riis' images and their analysis, this paper is going to give an insight into Riis' life in order to understand why the immigrant's life seemed to be as such important to him.