Multiple Views of the Metropolis. The New York of Jakob Riis and Alfred Stieglitz in John Reed’s Poetic and Writings
Keywords:
metropolis, photography, literature, below and aboveAbstract
In this paper I investigate how John Reed's poetics and narrative of the city represents the perfect blend of the perceptions of Jacob Riis and Alfred Stieglitz of New York. The metropolis seen from "below" (the poverty in the slums) and from "above" (the verticality and dynamism of skyscrapers) as two systems of space that emphasised the tremendous impact New York had in photography and literature in the early twentieth century. Both J. Riis and A. Stieglitz managed to capture the “below” and the “above” of the metropolis that is also perfectly expressed in the movie Metropolis (1927) by Fritz Lang: a dystopian city where the wealthy entrepreneurs, who rule the city, from the height of the skyscrapers banish the working class to work in the underground. In How the Other Half Lives: Study among the tenements of New York(1890) Riis describes and show through his photographs the awful conditions of the old and new immigrants settled in New York, his camera sneaks into the slums and the sweatshops of the Low East Side of New York revealing an infernal underworld made up of poverty and degradation; on the other hand Stieglitz, in most of his photos, points his camera to the heights of the skyscrapers which, like gothic cathedrals, tower to the sky as the 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 1911 and was literally captured by the city: new spaces, new perspectives opened before his eyes but also a world of suffering. Through the analysis of the poems The Foundation of a Skyscraper (1911), A Hymn to Manhattan (1913), his long poem America, 1918 (1918) and the article Immigrants (1911), I will try to highlight how the two photographers’ visions of New York merged together in John Reed’s works, and to shed light on tight relation between literature and photography.Downloads
References
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