Multiple Views of the Metropolis. The New York of Jakob Riis and Alfred Steiglietz in John Reed’s Poetic and Writings

In this paper I investigate how John Reed’s poetics and narrative of the city perfectly blend Jacob Riis and Alfred Stieglitz’s views of New York. Though they used two different kinds of artistic media, word and image, they captured the metropolis from “below” (the poverty in the slums), and from “above” (the wealth and the idea of progress expressed by the skyscrapers). New York had a tremendous impact on artists, writers and intellectuals. In How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York, an interesting example of photo-text, Riis describes the awful conditions of the old and new immigrants settled in New York: his camera sneaks into the slums and the sweatshops of the Lower East Side revealing an infernal underworld made up of poverty and degradation; by contrast, Stieglitz points his camera to the heights of the skyscrapers which, like gothic cathedrals, tower to the sky as harbingers of a radiant future. This dichotomy is found in John Reed’s poems and in some relevant articles published in the radical newspapers of his time. Reed as a young poet and journalist arrived in New York in 1910 and was fascinated by the city: new spaces, and new perspectives opened before his eyes but also a world of suffering. Through the analysis of the poems “A Hymn to Manhattan,” “Proud New York,” “America, 1918,” and the articles “Immigrants,” and the “Tide flows East,”, and the comparison with the photography “The Bent” by Riis, “The Steerage” and “City of Ambition” by Stieglitz, I will try to highlight how the two photographers’ visions of New York and John Reed’s writings can be brought into a mutual dialogue that sheds light on the tight relation between literature and photography.