Social Forces Visualized: Photography and Scientific Charity, 1900-1920

Social Forces Visualized offers an innovative view of the beginnings of social documentary photography in the United States. The exhibition includes over 125 photographs by seminal photographers Jacob Riis, Lewis Hine, Jessie Tarbox Beals, and others. The photographs were selected from over 1,000 images in the Community Service Society records at Columbia University's Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Many of the exhibition images have not been seen in public for close to a century.

The exhibition also includes a generous selection of original illustrations, maps, exhibition panels, and publications in which many of the photographs first appeared. Social Forces Visualized is organized by Drew Sawyer and Huffa Frobes-Cross, both Ph.D. candidates in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University.

This exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated book, Social Forces Visualized: Photography and Scientific Charity, 1900–1920, published by the gallery. Two curatorial essays highlight the significance of the images in the exhibition within the literature on documentary photography. The volume also includes a foreword by Maren Stange, a full catalogue of the exhibition and over 30 illustrations of objects that have rarely been seen.