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How the Other Half Lives
A tenement was an apartment building of many small flats, often with no windows in the inner rooms and a shared privy in the yard. The book is among the earliest cases of photography changing policy directly, and it led to New York's Tenement House Act of 1901, requiring windows, air shafts and indoor sanitation. Riis's own portrayal of immigrant groups is full of the stereotypes of his day, and the work is now read as much as a document of the reformers' gaze as of those they photographed.
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