Theodore Roosevelt: The Citizen.

RIIS, Jacob A. [Theodore Roosevelt].

Item Number: 103524

New York: The Outlook Company, 1904.

Early printing of Riis’s campaign biography of President Roosevelt. Octavo, original cloth with gilt titles and tooling to the spine and front panel, top edge gilt with others uncut, illustrated with seventeen engravings including tissue-guarded frontispiece portrait of Roosevelt drawn by George T. Tobin. In fine condition.

Considered one of the fathers of photography, Danish-American social reformer and social documentary photographer Jacob Riis was one of the first photojournalists to use his talents to expose the living conditions of the poor to encourage social reform. Through his candid photographs of impoverished New Yorkers at the turn of the 20th century, he attempted to alleviate these unbearable living conditions, which he himself experienced, by exposing them to the middle and upper classes. Upon his 1895 appointment to the presidency of the Board of Commissioners of the New York City Police Department, Roosevelt asked Riis to show him nighttime police work which led Roosevelt to close the police-managed lodging rooms in which Riis had suffered during his first years in New York. For his part, Riis wrote a authored the present campaign biography of Roosevelt.