"It was in this book that I found the photo Upstairs in Blind Man's Alley. Blind Man's Alley was located at 26 Cherry Street, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. According to Riis, it got its name because "its dark burrows harbored a colony of blind beggars, tenants of a blind landlord, old Daniel Murphy," who made a tremendous amount of money-$400,000, more than $40 million today-from the alley and surrounding tenements."
"As a blind person myself, I enlisted help from ChatGPT, which gives me elaborate image descriptions and allows me to ask questions about what it "sees." It described a "dimly lit, cramped tenement room with rough, cracked walls and a low ceiling." Three figures are arranged around "a small cast-iron stove with a kettle resting on top," including one woman with "a weary expression and loosely tied hair.""
"After "the blinding effect of the flash had passed away," he discovered that "a lot of paper and rags that hung on the wall were ablaze." It was just him and several blind people in an attic room with "a dozen crooked, rickety stairs" between them and the street. He managed to smother the fire "with a vast deal of trouble," and claimed that the blind people were unaware of their danger."
Jacob Riis entered New York tenements in 1887 using explosive flashlight powder as an early camera flash to expose extreme poverty. The photograph Upstairs in Blind Man's Alley captures a cramped attic at 26 Cherry Street inhabited by blind beggars and overseen by landlord Daniel Murphy, who profited heavily from the property. A contemporary account reports that Riis's flash nearly ignited paper and rags on the wall, forcing him to smother a fire while claiming the blind tenants were unaware. A blind observer used ChatGPT to generate detailed visual descriptions and questioned the assumption that the blind residents were oblivious to danger.
Read at ARTnews.com
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