Jacob Holdt - The American Pictures

I’m currently fully entranced by Danish activist Jacob Holdt’s enormous photo journal, simply titled “American Pictures” it is a unflinchingly honest outsiders description and treatise on poverty, race and class in America. I think this qoute from a profile in Vice magazine sums it up:

“As the American Pictures story goes, Holdt, facing multiple criminal charges after some nefarious left-wing activities during the late 60s, left Denmark intent on joining one of Latin America’s various guerrilla movements. He got sidetracked, hitching some 80,000 miles back and forth across America and bedding down with gangsters, junkies, prostitutes, and Klan members. His parents, wary of the outrageous letters he sent from the road, sent him a $30 Canon Dial half-frame camera to document it all. Five years later he’d taken nearly 15,000 of the country’s most indelible photographs.”

Especially relevant in the current economic climate against the background of cuts to social spending and the victimizing of the working poor its well worth a look. Although out of print since the 1990’s, second hand copies are not hard to come by and it’s available online in it’s entirety on Jacobs website.

In the early 1970s, when Jacob Holdt first arrived in the US with 40 dollars in his pocket, he planned to travel quickly across the country to South America. But, totally shocked and fascinated by what he discovered, he ended up staying five years. Holdt was not interested in photography as an art, but as one of many ways to inform about racism and injustice. He describes his documentary of America as “A Danish vagabond’s personal journey through the American underclass”.

United States 1970 - 1975 by Jacob Holdt, is published by Steidl in July 2007. Holdt has a website with his complete archive of photos and he’s still working on his photography today, travelling the world addressing oppression and poverty.