"Contradictory" is the watchword in scholarship on Danish-American photojournalist Jacob Riis. "Wildly contradictory, morally schizophrenic": so Keith Gandal describes Riis' work (18). "A deeply contradictory figure [...] a conservative activist and a skillful entertainer who presented controversial ideas in a compelling but ultimately comforting manner": such is the assessment of Riis offered by Bonnie Yochelson and Daniel Czitrom (xv). "The typical Victorian moralist," but also the Progressive-so Tom Buk-Swienty proclaims him (239, XIII). These assertions point up perhaps the central issue in the relatively small amount of scholarly work on Riis since his rediscovery by Alexander Alland in 1947. How does one resolve the contradictions, in his photos and texts, between protest of the plight of the ethnic urban poor and acceptance of pejorative nativist assumptions about them? Until the 1980s, scholars usually did so by emphasizing the apparent haziness of Riis' thought. According to Roy Lubove in The Progressives and the Slums, Riis' social theorizing was "unsystematic[...] almost impressionistic"(49); Charles Madison, editor of the 1970 Dover edition of How the Other Half Lives, calls Riis' sociological thought "relatively unsophisticated and[...] limited"(vii). To these scholars, Riis seems oblivious to the conflicting portrayals of the poor in his works.
