Roosevelt used publicity effectively throughout his career and
attracted the attention of photographers from the start.
Newspapers carried his words while photographs conveyed the
spirit of his intentions. Roosevelt's political maturation
paralleled major technical changes in photography. In the year
that the 23-year-old Roosevelt took his seat in the Assembly,
Frederick Ives established the first company to commercially
produce halftone photographic reproductions. The next twenty
years saw the rise of portable cameras, high speed dry plates,
plastic roll film, Eastman's first Kodak, and an increasing
interest in stereoscopic photographs of world-wide topics.
Roosevelt was presumably well aware of the potential power of
the photographic image. He met Jacob Riis, a journalist and
early practitioner of photography as an advocacy tool, shortly
after the publication of his famous work, How the Other Half
Lives (1890). As Police Commissioner, Roosevelt supported Riis
in his crusade to clean up New York's slums. Li