Jacob Riis was a social reformer and newspaper reporter who used photography to assist in the description of New York City slum conditions in his 1890 book How the Other Half Lives. He was pivotal in changing the perception of the poor as idle, ignorant, and undeserving. The advent of the magnesium flash in 1887 enabled Riis to take photographs that brought an immediacy to his tales of the living conditions of the urban poor, although his subjects were often asleep, drunk, or too preoccupied or frightened to object to the photography. Riis presented his work directly to the public in lantern-slide shows, confronting his curious audiences with a world it could no longer ignore.

Tabloid newspapers also theatricalized the common poor and made the gangster vivid. Arthur Fellig, a.k.a. Weegee, was the most famous twentieth-century crime photographer and his dramatic pictures of the mob matched the blackness of the headlines. Not a social reformer, but rather a keen and wry observer of street life, Weegee made pictures of crime scenes and the characters that populated them in 1930s and 1940s New York City. These images evoke not only an event itself, but the moments surrounding its occurrence, and often have brief enigmatic captions that heighten the drama of the captured instant.