Jacob Riis & the Manipulation of Photography

A typical staged photo using children as pawns by Jacob Riis

Riis did not limit such arrangements to the street toughs but posed more than a half a dozen images of young boys sleeping in stairwells and doorways. The pictures appear to have been taken in broad daylight and the small subjects are obviously pretending to be asleep. Whether they were indeed homeless remains a question open to modern viewers, but not one likely to have been asked by the photographer’s contemporaries.