Sentiment as Moral Motivator: From Jacob Riis's Lantern Slide Presentations to Harvard University's Social Museum

Abstract

This essay addresses ways in which sentiment was mobilised in social reform photography, specifically in the lantern slide presentations of Jacob Riis and in Harvard University's Social Museum – a collection of empirical data in the form of photographs and related graphic and text-based materials for the comparative study of social problems and solutions. Through his displays of previously unseen living and working conditions of the urban poor, Riis manipulated his audiences' emotions, provoking fear of and pity for the impoverished and immigrant masses. In contrast, the Social Museum was established to ‘promote investigations of modern social conditions and to direct the amelioration of industrial and social life’. While its founder Francis Greenwood Peabody also used sentiment as a moral catalyst, the vast majority of photographs in the Social Museum served a didactic purpose, portraying reform initiatives and institutions that he viewed as the only solutions to social problems.