Dear friends


"I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a more promising New Year in which, through continued loving dialog with each other, we can become better inoculated against the destructive influence of Putin, Trump and Hamas on our lives."
Strangely enough, this is how I started last year, and since we have to spend so much time again this year integrating with those we don't quite feel we can accommodate, I will try to make my annual navel-gazing retrospective even more concise.
If it's still too long - for I did not edit out all the stuff only Danes understand - you can choose to go directly to the section that might interest you, or skip the whole thing with a quick "Ctrl F" search on your own name to make sure you haven't gotten any bad publicity again this year :-)

1. the family
Only of interest to those who know us

2. My "work" as an involuntary retiree
...but you've all seen my lectures, so skip to the next chapter

3. My new book "The Ghetto in Our Hearts"
about the echo chambers and filter bubbles we use to exclude others

4. My exhibitions
...not much this year, so go on...

5. Our vacations
only of interest to those of you looking for less climate-impacting vacations

6. My work in the Ubuntu House
including more about the Israel-Gaza war

7. Deaths and other events of the year
.... Well, I'll remember to mention you too when the time comes...

8. Revisiting the past





THE FAMILY

Most of you end your Christmas letters with a bit about the family, but as you know, I put the family first and will start with it before you fall asleep...

.....our son, Daniel, still loves his job as a caregiver in nursing homes and for the disabled, especially because it allows him to continue his travels around the world where he has seen almost every country. In February, he wheeled the disabled Susheela around in a wheelchair in Jamaica. She is adopted from India, but they both love black culture and especially Jamaican music.

Normally he always stays privately with people, so as her caretaker he wasn't too happy about staying in her luxury hotel.
He made up for it by hitchhiking around England's poor old industrial towns in April, staying with all sorts of fun characters.

In May, he finally got his wish to travel to one of the only countries in the world he had yet to experience, Algeria. Since there are no tourists there at all, he was swept off his feet by everyone who wanted to pay anything for him and became hugely popular with everyone he stayed with.

In a way, it was also a sentimental reunion with all the "arabian uncles" he had grown up with when I accommodated up to 66 Algerian refugees in Ubuntuhuset in the 1980s. I sent him some of their writings in my guest books and asked him to try to find their families. He didn't succeed, but it helped to make him even more popular that he had helped to house their compatriots when they needed help.

There is no doubt that all the love he received as a child from his Arab uncles has helped give him the trust in strangers that today carries him safely around the world.

After working in a nursing home here at home all summer, he set off again on a journey through Turkey, India and China, where he is at the time of writing. But a lot has happened in China since he hitchhiked through it for the first time in 2004. Now it's like traveling in a science fiction world with robots and facial recognition everywhere. When he does something wrong on the street or in the subway, he is immediately shouted at in English over the loudspeaker while all the Chinese are addressed in Chinese. Creepy!

..... Our daughter Lalou has become much more climate conscious and traveled mostly on shorter Interrail trips in Europe - even all the way to Portugal just to meet up with a friend for five days. In my last Christmas letter on the occasion of the Gaza tragedy, I told about how she herself had previously been bombed there during her work with Gaza's already traumatized children. But it may be that her work with traumatized children and battered women around the world has paid off. This summer, she applied for a pHd program at University of CPH on partner violence and out of 200 applicants from all over the world, she was one of the few called for an interview and only fifteen minutes later the university called to say she got the job. So now she has an office at UCPH just 500 meters from us, We helped her move from her psychology practice at Israels Plads, where she had long ago had to stop the influx of new battered women.

.... As I wrote last year, my wife Vibeke continues to drive me crazy as a pensioner. From morning to night, she throws herself into her absolutely important projects in both house and cottage, although this year she got help from our good neighbor, Einar, to build a new terrace and steps so that our friend Sofie Jama doesn't have to break her legs to get into the house again. .-)
Vibeke works hard first and foremost for the larger family and friends - while she thinks I spend too much time integrating with the "enemies " 😊
I don't dare say more about Vibeke here, as she is very private and shuts herself away in audio books and podcasts during work 😊

Our new granddaughter Elna has become another joy in our lives. She actually belongs to Christian Lund and Lærke Rydal Jørgensen, but as their parents are either dead or far away, Vibeke and I offered to become Elna's more distant grandparents, as our own children are too busy to have children.

However, this has some unfortunate consequences; for example, we had to look after Elna on the exact same days as my four Christmas parties this year, as they coincided with Christian and Lærke's own Christmas parties with Louisiana employees. As I'm not very social at sit-down dinners, it felt like a relief to avoid these drinking parties. But unfortunately,my old travel companion, Pia Tafdrup'sbook publication at Gyldendal also suffered. Other times we took Elna along to our own lunch invitations, like here at Henriette Heegård's.

These pictures are not very complete. Just before Christmas, I sent one and a half thousand of the pictures I have taken of Elna so far to Christian and L�rke for their album with her.

Right now Elna is only two years old, but we expect Christian and Lærke to leave her with us even more frequently in the future when he (like recently) travels to interview friends like author Orhan Pamuk in Istanbul for his Louisiana Channels series with the world's most famous writers. Unfortunately, I will also miss some of their lectures while caring for Elna during his Louisiana Literature Festival.

Our dog Tajois now 12 years old and still runs 7-8 km every morning with me on Hornbæk beach or Langelinie and Kastellet. Tajo has become incredibly jealous of all the attention Elna now gets, but loves sleeping with her in bed and even eating Lærke's packed lunches, which Elna didn't eat in the nursery.

....and myself? ..... Well, not much happens after the morning runs. But it's slowly dawned on me at my advanced age that I can't escape my own traumas. The defeat I suffered in high school due to my ADHD, which means that your mind is always somewhere else than where you should be, and therefore you can't follow conversations or remember what you don't learn - well, it gave me an early feeling of being an outsider and not being good enough. Since this is something you can't change, it gave me an early sense of shame. In my youth, I learned to compensate for it by escaping onto the road, where I found myself at home among people who felt even more outside and with even more shame. And later, with the (for others unbearable) demand for attention that often comes with it as compensation, I achieved some success by fleeing for 40 years on the roads with my monologues about the other outcasts. But it was constantly like a refugee crossing his tracks, and now that as a pensioner I no longer get so much of this artificial attention, it's as if the whole trauma is catching up with me. When I'm with my old high school friends - and it's still a great pleasure to meet them - it's as if the distress patterns are re-stimulated by discovering that I still feel dumber and at least more uninformed than them.

One problem I have today is that the echo chambers Vibeke and I typically find ourselves in are mostly made up of deeply intellectual and well-read friends, such as the many artists in our summer house neighborhood half the year or here in our fashionable Nyboder neighborhood the rest of the year. Especially when they talk at the dinner tables about which celebrities are married to whom - from first, second and third marriages etc.  I feel in my ignorance that I have just arrived from another planet - and unlike in my previous life, I can no longer apologize for my long absence in the US for half the year. Over there, I was the opposite culturally, but I was something of a vagabond by virtue of my specially acquired vagabond knowledge of a political subject, which allowed me to mingle with even the best educated Ivy League students and artists. Probably also because I had a more flexible brain with a little more memory than at 77.

Yes, it's not easy getting old, and I shouldn't complain about how I've fared in life, especially when compared to many of the similar problems faced by so many young people who don't have the same hopeful expectations for the future as my generation did. Which is worse: feeling like a failure at school without knowing at the time that it wasn't your fault or, like today's young people, being burdened by so many diagnoses that tell them early on that they have no future?
That's why it amazes both me and my wife that being with those we care about can sometimes make me so depressed...
....all of you highly educated people who are able to read these navel gazing stories to the end 😊

A LITTLE ABOUT MY REAL "WORK"

Fortunately, my lectures On saying Yes are still catching on, but are waning as I hardly get involved in the media anymore. At Viby Efterskole, we recently celebrated my 30th anniversary there with my old musical, Amerikanske Billeder.


But you can also decorate yourself with feathers. For example, for a long time I have promised the Adventure Club, of which I am a member, that I can step in with one of my many lectures at a day's notice if they suddenly get a cancellation from a lecturer. So suddenly I had to come with "Can we love the Ku Klux Klan?" when Eske Willerslev canceled for the second time. He is apparently so popular that the venue was packed with people even from the middle of Jutland. So if you want to be successful as a lecturer, just put a more famous person on the poster!!!

Or you have to make sure that the audience can't run away like at my recent lecture in the Storstrøms prison. However, there was one of the black prisoners who tried to run away, but was caught by the guards. It was during the second lecture of the day where I skipped my introductory talk about how I had disarmed America's black criminals with very empathetic thinking about them, which was hugely popular with the prisoners. And of course, about the thing that bound us together; our common ADHD and its typical characteristics of "accessive risk taking" by not being able to foresee the consequences of your actions.
The priest wanted to hear more about my work on loving the Ku Klux Klan as well, with the result that without this necessary introduction to nonviolent communication, the second team of truly hardened criminals and gang members ended up thinking that I was actually a member of the KKK. This went down well with some racists, but obviously not with the kind of blacks and browns that the media in Denmark often hatefully call "foreigners".
When I was in the cozy Herstedvester prison a few years ago, over half of my prisoners bought my book "American Pictures". Down here in the Storstrøm prison I didn't sell even one book, although almost all the white imates came up and thanked me afterwards with as much emotion as people with a hard childhood can muster.

MY NEW BOOK: "The Ghetto in Our Hearts - American Images through 50 Years of Black and White History"

Last year I wrote a little about why work on the book is going so slowly. But now that Gutkind has hired Søren Møller Christensen to edit the book, something is happening. Unlike me, he pays a lot of attention to detail with language and facts and hired the tough 82-year-old theologian and associate professor emeritus to edit my texts. But since she doesn't edit on a computer, she was given a Bible-thick printout that she scribbled on in pencil. And I certainly got my due, as Søren had promised. As a feminist and author of "Women's Theology and the Legacy of Eve", she rejected several of the sections that both Kirsten Thorup and Per Kofod had approved as obsolete.

But it was good because it forced me to put myself into today's thinking about it. So I had to sit in first class on our Interrail trip to make room to edit all her scribbles and google the best quotes. Because as something new, each of the historical sections I've seen and experienced over the 50 years since the Civil Rights struggle now has headlines about the section's topic and the best quotes by black writers and artists. Everything from James Baldwin to Beyoncé.

That's why it was a great experience during the Christian Lund Literature Festival to have dinner with one of the writers I use quotes from in several places, namely the non-binary, HIV-positive queer poet and performer, Danez Smith.
When I told him that I had lived with his queer friend Sapphire for several years and even knew James Baldwin, who was a fan of "American Pictures", he was so excited that he immediately stripped down to show me all his James Baldwin tattoos. Because Baldwin, with his courage to come out early as gay, was his greatest idol and inspiration.

Another person I use a lot of quotes from and who has inspired me the most is Isabel Wilkerson, whose seminal work "Caste - the origins of our discontent" immediately resonated with me. Because with her convincing analysis and comparison of the black-white American, Hindu and Nazi caste systems towards Jews (Hitler stole the Nuremberg Laws directly from the American race laws), I suddenly realized why I have so often been criticized when I compare Danish "racism" towards immigrants and Muslims (including white Danish Muslims) with American racism towards black people. Of course, I mean our "casteism" about the distancing way we think of others as not really belonging and who we don't want to mix with.
And I also did that as a vagabond in the USA, as I can see from the picture books I made on the road to show Americans my pictures. I almost never used the word "racism", which I associated with past racial hatred and the KKK, but frequently used terms like "the American caste system". By trying to change this angle in "The Ghetto in Our Hearts", i.e. the echo chambers and filter bubbles we actively exclude others with, I hope that everyone can better see themselves in the book. Because unlike "racism", as Isabel Wilkerson shows, no one is responsible outside the all-pervasive and oppressive hierarchical casteism.

It was also a great experience this summer to have my American language editor, author Vincent Czyz and his beautiful Turkish wife, Neslihan and company, visit me both in my summer house and in Gernersgade. But also challenging, as I had forgotten how much Americans talk 😊

MY EXHIBITIONS

My exhibition in Panicale, Italy, last year fell victim to climate change, as the heat in July had become so unbearable that no one was likely to come. So it has now been postponed until May-June 2025, when I will go again.
There may also be an exhibition in Arles in the Manuel Rivera-Ortiz Foundation Museum created by one of my old students from Rochester Institute of Tech.
As a young man,Manuel Rivera Ortiz was so moved by my show that he wanted to be a photographer for the poor himself, and was so successful that he was even able to create a large museum. He talked about his inspiration back then in a long email to Christian Lund when he made the video about how I had made the pictures when I was young, some of which later became worth exhibiting. If you didn't see the video in May when Chanel Louisiana launched it, you can watch it now when you have time during the Christmas holidays.
Photographer Jacob Holdt: A message of love

OUR HOLIDAYS

Absolutely only of interest to people looking for inspiration for a different kind of vacation!

Spring vacation:
When you start to see with your own eyes the consequences of the climate damage we cause with our overuse of the earth's resources
in the form of ruined exhibitions, flooded railways and rivers, I find it hard to understand why so many of even my best informed friends continue to fly, for example. Especially on vacations over the heads of the damned. In any case, I don't feel that it has been much of a sacrifice to give up all the freedom you get instead with railways, which outside the reactionary fossil-fuel consuming Denmark are increasingly running climate neutral in the EU using wind and solar power. Because unlike the rigidity of airplanes - both inside and outside by landing at places and beaches from which you can't move on - I love the spontaneity of Interrail by being able to change direction daily, for example to where the sun is currently shining the most or where you read that there are currently the best exhibitions.
Or the thrill of - if you can agree on the goal - competing with your spouse to find the funniest, cheapest or most dog-friendly hotels and bed & breakfasts with the sweetest hosts one hour before arrival. For Airbnb, we avoid since they are destroying the cities by displacing their poor. This makes tourists unpopular as we have seen with the large anti-tourist demonstrations this year in Barcelona, for example. And when I see the newspaper ads with sky-high prices for charter trips, there is also money to be saved by only 2-3 days of travel at 35 dollars per day to relax and enjoy the warmth of the African coasts. Or to London, Paris or Vienna in one day for just 35 dollars.

The most expensive thing is the hotels, which we can usually get for $ 55-100 with breakfast. OK, granted, after changing hotels every night for a week, it's also nice to find a nice place overlooking the sea to relax for a week, as we did by using our friends' Hans Henrik and Christina's wonderful house in Torrox Costa an hour from Malaga on our spring trip.

Fortunately, we managed to experience the Valencia area before climate change drowned 231 there later in the year. Spain's other cultural gems such as Barcelona, Malaga, Madrid, Toledo, etc. were also almost unknown to me after all the years I wasted in the US trying to understand the climate, and contained wonderful museums (Prado, Thyssen, Carmen Thyssen, Sofia Reina, Bunuel, El Greco, etc. not to mention Malaga's automobile museum) that we never made it to Portugal on this trip as planned. But Tajo still experienced Lisbon's great river, after which it is named, as it also runs through the incredible Toledo with its medieval Arab, Jewish and Christian monuments.

On the way home, we made longer stops in Arles and Avignon to make an appointment with Manuel's museum for an exhibition. And in Marseilles to meet the American film director, David Redmon, who wanted to make a movie about me because the use of some of my pictures had scared his daughter so much in school that she and the students had imagined me as a monster. Although her father was educated at Harvard, he didn't know me, but he Googled me and invited me to his home so his daughter could see that I wasn't so bad. She then invited me to give a talk at school to show her friends that she had had the courage to befriend their "monster".

They gave us an amazing tour of Marseille's old neighborhoods.
We were equally excited to spend a few days in Strasbourg with its wonderful old half-timbered houses and to see the EU Parliament as our last stop.

But see more about the whole trip in my diary entries and pictures here:
Spring tour - Our 7th Interrail trip - to Spain, Italy and France

The trip in the fall:
When we got home, we moved into the summer house and enjoyed the company of the neighbors there until the next Interrail trip in the fall. We traveled with a group of drunk Swedes on our way to Oktoberfest in Munich - every 20 minutes there were just as many trains from Hamburg. But when we arrived in the thousands of lederhosen-clad Bavarian costumes we preferred to spend the night in Innsbruck instead of having the Tajo trampled after two hours, rather than going to the Venice Biennale the next day. Two years ago I hadn't realized how big it really is, but now I discovered the very best in the Arsenale, where the theme this year was "Strangers Everywhere" with a special emphasis on indigenous artists from the 4th world and queer artists , just my cup of tea with an incredible visual beauty. Then we went to our friends Annemarie Ræbild and Laus Strandby Nielsen in Panicale to stay there during the rainy season in their magnificent villa close to my upcoming exhibition museum. However, we missed a bus in Castiglione del Lago - even though Italian trains are the most precise in Europe - with the result that we had to hitchhike with two suitcases and a dog in the middle of rush hour. Every time we do this, we are ONLY picked up by the very poorest foreigners in the smallest messy sardinian villages. In the old castle of Panicales, we were invited to a sumptuous dinner by the new American owners, George and Roxanne Miller, who have created the world's largest collection of puzzles in the 52 rooms. It took us two hours to see all the rooms and the hotel next door, which they bought to make room, before we could sit down atthe mansion table.
The next evening, Annemarie had invited the illustrious direct descendant of Dante Alieghieri and his even more illustrious wife Karla to dinner. After a week or so of rain, during which I finalized texts in my book, we headed south to cross over to the Greek islands. From the wonderful Salerno, we took a day trip over to the dreadful tourist spots of Portuzino and Amalfi (which I agonized over for three days after climbing the 3000 steps down to the coastal town during my stay at San Cataldo in 2013).

But before we took the ferry to Greece from Bari all the way down by the hill to the south, we wanted to see Puglia - the part of southern Italy we didn't get to see during the Sicily trip in 2021. And especially the ancient city of Sassi di Matera with caves underneath that have been inhabited for 7000 years. I've seen a lot in the world, but this city, unknown to me until now, is definitely one of the world's gems , which we wandered around for a whole day. And the nearby old castle town of Gravina di Puglia was even more romantic than the others Vibeke dreams of buying a house in up in northern Italy. For a while I was tempted by Irsina along with all the Americans who live here, but I soon discovered that it wasn't quite the kind of Americans I was dreaming of 😊
To avoid another week of climate fluctuations in the Florence area, we went home early to visit my old cousin Birgit in Aalborg, who I thought was dead, but like another Lazarus from the grave came strolling to receive us. And a little vacation in Skagen with Vibeke's sister Eva.
Well, but here the whole journey is a little more detailed:

Autumn - Our 8th Interrail trip - to Italy

MY WORK AT UBUNTUHUSET

Ubuntuhuset's "100% for the children"

Here Camilla Legendre and Charlotte Lea Jensen continue their work for Africa's vulnerable and marginalized children in 100% for the children.

Ubuntuhuset's "Brobyggerne".
A great experience was experiencing Özlem Cekic's lecture about being a bridge builder between the Trumpists and the Democrats in the US. She had asked me if I had good contacts among them, and I had teased her about her crazy attempt to get them in the same house. We had just had a visit from one of Vibeke's distant relatives from Ohio, who told us that he didn't even know how his own wife would vote (but guessed that, unlike himself, it was for Trump) and that no one even dares to talk politics with their children anymore in the distorted hateful division. Özlem didn't succeed either, but with the tools she has acquired as a bridge builder here at home, she managed to open up each camp so much that they poured out their hearts to her with feelings that she could pass on to us here at home - not least me, who since 2008 has completely lost my footing in the US.
Watch her excellent lecture about it here on YouTube (in Danish)

New Outlook, our Jewish peace group in Ubuntu House
The Jewish peace group New Outlook's dialogues in the Ubuntu House continued its reconciliatory work, which has become so difficult after Israel's worsening attacks on Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank. As a longtime active defender of both Israel and Palestine, under the current fascist government, I find it difficult to keep a straight face and no longer dare to participate in public debates in the hateful climate. Isabel Bramsen gave an excellent talk in Ubuntuhuset about what peace really is.

It was a great pleasure to help organize the lecture with my long-time friend from Esbjerg Statsskole, Peter Langwithz Smith, about his enormous research into the Holocaust based on the film "In the zone of interest".
You must definitely watch the lecture here.

But come and participate in the dialogues yourself - not least by taking part in the annual festive light festival in Ubuntuhuset, which this year falls on Sunday 29 December 2024 from 15-18. I think Hanukkah belongs naturally in Ubuntuhuset. After all, it's my own lovely family that started the tradition, as it killed more Jews than Hamas. But at the same time, it was also my family who became the savior of the Jews 😊

Last year, I was presented with the Jewish Peace Prize during the Jewish Culture Week in the synagogue. Unfortunately, this year I had to hand over the trophy to Imam Naveed Baid, who shortly afterwards consecrated Sherin Khankan at the Dragør Fort.

Mariam Mosque and the Exit Circle
Sherin Khankan gave this dazzling lecture on psychological and sexualized violence (also against men) to social workers and activists from all over the country at Ubuntuhuset. Watch it and learn from it:

Exit Circle's website on psychological violence

But shortly before, Exitcirklen celebrated its 10-year anniversary in there with a performance by Pernille Rosenbaum, among others. I've been involved from the beginning, so it's incredible now to see that Exitcirklen has branches in all the major Danish cities. Unfortunately, I have not illustrated the anniversary yet, as Hawar Shuan will not return with my camera until Christmas Eve.

Crossing Borders
I am still on the Advisory Board for Crossing Borders, which due to lack of space had to move from Ubuntuhuset to Union at Nørre Side Alle 7. This also entails a lot of meeting activities for me, which would be too much to go into here.
More about Crossing Borders.

But see all our other events and history here:

www.american-pictures.com/ubuntu/

THE DEAD OF THE YEAR

Nils Vest 1944-2024
It's hard, but not unexpected that your friends start to fall away when you reach a certain age. Nils and I became attached to each other at an early age and, strangely enough, developed a certain friendship. It probably started when we were arrested together during the Sun Wagon's Rebild action in 1976 and then we did a lot of other activities together until, to our amazement, we woke up together at the hospital after we had surgery for prostate cancer at exactly the same hour in our joint attempt to postpone death for a while.

The hardest part was during dinners with him and Britta surviving their tendency to postpone the end of the conversation until the late hours of the night 😊

As with many of my best friends, I also made a website about Nils and Britta, which is still under construction:
www.american-pictures.com/gallery/friends/Nils.Vest.htm

Marianne Wilkins

As young activists, Marianne and I had a short-lived relationship, which continued later in life at her annual dinners where we were seated with her other former boyfriends and their wives and her African-American husband, whose funeral we attended shortly before her sudden passing. She was an incredibly lovely gathering of exciting intellectuals where the discussions were always heated.

Mark Godfrey - 1943-2024
I have often enough referred to the Godfrey family as my saving angel, without whom I would never have made American Pictures - both here and in the movie "An American love story". And not least here in my memoir.

Kirsten Dehlholm
Kirsten Dehlholm's death was a terrible loss for creative and imaginative Danish art. I came to know her when she got our 8-year-old son Daniel and his classmates to perform in her Carpe Carpe play in the B&W halls in 1988. Here are my videos of them:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6jdLHzF658&t=1875s
www.youtube.com/watch?v=co1iDVItcu8&t=63s
www.hotelproforma.dk/project/carpe-carpe-carpe/
And here they are together 17 years later.

Vagn Henrik Mølby 1947-2024
The butcher's son back home from my childhood village Fåborg, who I played with as a child. The last time I saw him for the publication of my book On Saying Yes, however, he was severely affected by Parkinson's.

REUNION WITH THE PAST

Jørgen Dragsdahl 75
My old friend and inspiration for "American Pictures" Jørgen turned 75 this year. Here is a little more about our friendship.



Care re-union
After 27 years as ambassador and traveling photographer for Care, it was a great experience to meet many of the old employees again from when we were only four employees to today where it is a huge NGO.



Reunion with me?
I've always wanted to give the best of my art pictures, which V1 Gallery is selling here for 5,000 dollars each, to my old friends as a memory of our friendship. And many have received them for birthdays and the like.

So this will be your possible Christmas gift this year -to get one of these - my most popular pictures - or another one of your choice - only at the print price in Ikea frames. Let me know if you are interested.

Merry Christmas and a

Happy New Year

with loving thoughts for all


Remember that the love we give out ....
...... will come back many times over!!!

Trump: "Jacob, I never stopped loving you"

Jacob Holdt
Gernersgade 63, 1319 Copenhagen K
Tel.  20-324412    jacob@holdt.us 
www.facebook.com/jacob.holdt/

See MOMA Louisiana's new film with me about how I made my pictures:
Photographer Jacob Holdt: A message of love

Follow my updated photo stories on Instagram:
www.instagram.com/jacobholdtofficial/

www.american-pictures.com

See the show American Pictures part one and two