When I was a little girl, my parents used to have astrophysicists over for dinner. Before they arrived for bubbling baked ziti, as my mom was still brushing garlic butter over the bread baking in the oven, she’d pull me aside.
“Erica,” she’d ask, “Did you pick your question?”
Before dinner conversation launched into dull adult topics, I was allowed the full attention of our credentialed guests to ask one question about science. How big is the Earth compared to the sun? I got my answer through visual metaphor. If the sun is the size of my house, our home planet is a single superball inside of it. One million Earths could be stuffed inside of the sun.
And it isn’t only little girls impatient for dessert who need an assist in interpreting data. Facts exist. But they need an advocate. Pulling that information and shaping it into a useful form — so that it can change understanding, change practices, change lives — that’s the challenge. And pictures really help.
In 1890, three fourths of New York City’s population lived in disease ridden, dangerous squalor, stacked into tenement houses. More than one million people were being ignored because they were essentially invisible. Jacob Riis, photojournalist and troublemaker, wanted the city to see them. He took a new technology, the magnesium camera flash, and used it to literally cast light into black places. He traveled from apartment to apartment, to outdoor rooftop encampments, all-night “restaurants” where men slept across tables; he visited starved children and alley-dwellers and took their picture. It was a revolutionary act.
When he published the images in “How the Other Half Lives” along with documented information about the state of the city, people had to pay attention. Theodore Roosevelt joined him on his nighttime walks through the city’s darkest, most desperate places — and things began to change.
He didn’t stop. In 1891, he published an ongoing story titled “The Things We Drink” along with pictures of the raw sewage that was contaminating the city’s drinking water. He included facts from doctors on how cholera lives and multiplies under the conditions he photographed. The city bought the land that surrounded its troubled reservoir and avoided a deadly epidemic.
He used images as data — proof of facts. He believed it was wrong the infant mortality rate was ten percent, or that 12 adults were sleeping on the floor of one small room, that there were no fire escapes, no windows, and that people were dying at shocking rates of preventable diseases. So, he showed the truth — and in 1901, the Tenement House Act was passed. Life improved for millions of people.
I think that’s the raw power of documenting information and making it understandable. We get to drink safe water, live long healthy lives in the sun, and know exactly how many superballs it takes to model our home star.
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