Kimberly Little
On Progressive-era Photography

AN OLD REAR TENEMENT, clearly overcrowded, with laundry hanging from the porch: the scene could be straight from Jacob Riis's seminal 1890 work, How the Other Half Lives, perhaps another angle of Riis's "Old Rear-Tenement in Roosevelt Street." Riis was not the photographer, however, and it is in the details of this image that one may begin to understand an alternative history of Progressive-era photography. While misery, even the appearance of death, plagued the people in Riis's book, just as deterioration and dirt pervaded his environment, this photograph, titled "A Back Yard on North Ninth Street," and a second one, appearing later in this essay, revealed a different vision of the tenements; the photographs offered hope. Their publication also reflects the broader gender roles that some Progressives adopted in their fight to reform the city (see Figure 1).	1
Figure 1. "A Back Yard on North Ninth Street." Charlotte Rumbold, Housing Conditions in St. Louis. Report of the Housing Committee of the Civic League of St. Louis (St. Louis: Civic League, 1908).
These photographs, taken by St. Louis city engineer Charles Holt, came from a 1908 book written by Progressive reformer Charlotte Rumbold titled Housing Conditions in St. Louis.1Housing Conditions was full of Riisian-inspired photographs and text.2 Like Riis's illustrations, Holt's photographs exposed the sordid details of tenement life around the turn of the twentieth century. Dinginess pervaded all static surfaces in the scene. The North Ninth Street photograph depicted the "Children's Playground," as Rumbold termed the deck, above at least eight "yard vaults" with their presumably noxious odor.3 The architecture was haphazard and chaotic. Gangplanks and a tangle of laundry lines unsafely connected the tenements. The twenty-one people pictured, including numerous children, stood on the cluster of porches on North Ninth Street as witnesses to St. Louis's overcrowding.4 Rumbold explained in her accompanying text, "It is hard to make the more fortunate comprehend the inevitableness of the friction that comes from living so close together."5	2
Despite the obvious similarities with Riis's work, the message of Rumbold and Holt's photographs was also quite different. The maze of laundry lines offered one clue. Although less clear in this photograph than in others in Housing Conditions, the laundry on the lines was bright white.6 Rumbold lamented the cost to a family of a mother's housekeeping in tenements, asking, "Could not such a woman help her family more ... by spending the strength and passion of work which cleanliness here entails, in earning money by work outside the house, and using it to move and maintain her family in better surroundings?"7 The photograph's depiction of laundry with Rumbold's textual references to a "suicidal mania for cleanliness" humanized tenement dwellers, placing the blame for what was wrong in their environment not only on themselves but on society at large; the clean laundry showed that they were trying to improve their environment.	. . .