Glasgow 1868
When Glasgow's City Improvement Trust wanted a photographer to document condemned siums, they picked Thomas Anna, a portrait artist who rejected the typicl props of the day. (He even converted a hansom cab into a darkroom.)Annan was among the very first to chronicle the life of the urban poor in photos such as the one beloe. Critics say he concentrated more on buildings than on the souls within, but his images tell a clear, sad tale.
Photograph by Thomas Annan
International Museum of Photography,George Eastman House
New York City c.1880
Muckrakers were busy on both sides of the Atlantic in the late 1800s. While Annan was chronicling Glasgow and John Thomson was exposing the down-and-out in his Street Life in London, Jacob Riis was cataloguing the lives of “street arabs,” nomadic children in New York City who had been abandoned or neglected in ways people are ashamed to treat dogs today. Riis’s How the Other Half Lives, a sensation in 1890, remains a classic.
Photograph by Jacob Riis
The Jacob A. Riis Collection, Museum of the City of New York