When The Mysteries and Miseries of the Great Metropolis appeared in 1874, it exposed readers to the hidden struggles of New York’s poorest residents. Journalist Arthur Pember went undercover as a beggar, street preacher, and circus performer to investigate life in the city’s underworld. To give visual weight to his reporting, Pember collaborated with Jeremiah Gurney, one of New York’s most respected photographers and a pioneer of the daguerreotype.

Gurney photographed Pember in his various disguises, and those photographs were then translated into wood-engraved illustrations for the published book. By turning Gurney’s images into engravings, publishers could economically print them on the same pages as the text, ensuring wide circulation while also allowing engravers to heighten drama through manual engraving techniques.

These illustrations blurred the line between documentary evidence and theatrical staging. They gave readers the sense of witnessing the city’s “mysteries and miseries” firsthand, while also underscoring Pember’s larger critique of poverty, crime, and corruption.

By the time Jacob Riis published How the Other Half Lives in 1890, halftone technology had advanced enabling Riis to present unaltered images of New York’s tenements, lending his work a new kind of documentary authority and veracity. Whereas Pember and Gurney relied on staged photographs translated into engravings, Riis’s use of actual photographs marked a decisive shift in how readers perceived urban poverty and helped shape modern investigative photojournalism.