THE DREAM AND ITS DARK SIDE
 

by Andrian Kreye


published in GEO, November 2022



See German original on pdf            Here in Danish

 

At the beginning of November, Congress will be elected in the USA, and once again racism and the gap between rich and poor will dominate the debates. Danish photographer Jacob Holdt traveled the country in the 1970s.
His pictures shocked the world and show us today how deeply rooted the division is in American society

 

 

IT WAS AFTER A PARTY in the middle of a busy San Francisco street when Jacob Holdt first felt the barrel of a gun in his ribs. He had arrived in the U.S. less than a week ago, a young Danish hippie on a vagabond trip. There wasn't much in it for him. He gave the muggers five dollars he had earned that afternoon donating blood. And yet it wasn't fear or anger that so shocked him at that moment. "What shocked me the most was that they mugged me right in front of about 20 black people waiting at a bus stop with no one doing anything," he says. "That's when I realized that this kind of thing was commonplace in the ghetto." He didn't want to escape that night, either. He wanted to meet the muggers. Just as he always wanted to get to know the people who insulted, threatened or assaulted him during his years in America.


"I often got them around because I didn't show fear when someone came at me with guns or whatever," Holdt says a half-century later on a sunny morning in his study in Copenhagen. "When they expected fear and someone suddenly didn't see them as this monster they had become, but loved them as people, which they were. That's when the gangsters and crooks often melted away." So he lived for a while with a murderer in New Orleans, in Baltimore he accompanied a mugger on his robberies, in New York's black neighborhood of Harlem he found shelter with junkies. By then he had long since brought his camera with him. And so, over the next few years, he produced his book "Pictures from America," which is one of the key works of anti-racism. He took these pictures in the early seventies. Not as a reporter, but as someone who had experienced everything he was documenting.


"Behind hate, there's always fear. And pain," he says. He still has his beard braided into a pigtail that reaches below his breastbone, his long hair is white, his face has become narrow. Anyone who talks to him already understands why all the otherwise invisible people in America let this Danish hippie sleep and take pictures in their shacks, houses and apartments. The starving, the junkies, the plantation workers and the lonely mothers without work, the prostitutes, muggers and killers, the Black Panthers, but also the exploiters, the lynchers and the Ku -Klux -Klan. All those who have no place in the myth of America, because they expose the promises of this country as lies with their life stories. And who face the world and people otherwise with distrust, anger and hatred. With Holdt, there was no distance, no accusations, no doubts.


THREE PHOTO BOOKS have taken away the magic of the USA being the land of the free and the brave in the 20th century. "Pictures from America" still packs the biggest punch, because what Jacob Holdt's pictures lack is hope. For the immigrants from Europe and Asia that Jacob Riis took into the slums of New York at the end of the 19th century in poverty and squalor for "How the Other Half Lives," there was the promise of rising into the middle class with work and willpower. The natural disaster that turned the American West into a dust bowl during the Great Depression of the 1930s and turned its inhabitants into refugees, portrayed by Dorothea Lange in "An American Exodus," passed. For the people in Jacob Holdt's pictures, however, there is still no future. They live in a continuation of the inhumanity that began with their deportation from Africa and found no end despite the abolition of slavery. Poverty, hunger and violence are the leitmotifs that run through the book. Although he took his photographs mainly in those years in which the victories of the civil rights movement in America created an almost euphoric mood of departure.


But in the slums, the impoverished countryside, the labor camps and prisons where Jacob Holdt hung out, this bitter despair continued to prevail, and was soon to break out again. At the latest with the marches of the Black Lives Matter movement, it became clear to the world that little had changed in America. That's why these pictures still have such a shocking effect today, because they show an extent of poverty that one would not have suspected even if one were otherwise aware of the contradictions and injustices in the richest country in the world.


The journey through these abysses began with a shock for Jacob Holdt himself. It was pure coincidence that he ended up in the USA. Holdt was 23 years old and without a plan or a job in Canada, staying on the farm of acquaintances, when he made the decision to join the guerrillas in Guatemala. The Mayan country in southern Mexico was then, along with Vietnam, the model case of what happens when the U.S. imposes its imperialism with all its might. A CIA-backed coup d'état, an America-friendly dictator, repression, insurrection, mass murder.

 
Jacob Holdt had FOURTY DOLLARS in his pocket. He wanted to hitchhike there. But he didn't get far. An acquaintance then dropped him off in San Francisco. It was February 23, 1971. "My first day in the U.S." He first drifted through the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, the epicenter of the counterculture. "I walked around there and just loved the hippies, especially the women in those long Indian skirts." A young black man immediately offered him a place to stay. That's how he fared all day. Girls especially were eager to take him home. "Actually, I would have loved to go with them," he recalls. "But I had a philosophy that you can't pick people, because then you always pick the young against the old, the beautiful against the ugly, or the white against the black or whatever. You always have to say yes to the first person who invites you home."


And so he went with the young black man, a student from San Francisco State University. "Late that night, I came to see him. He said he had to take a test for his math class the next day at the university, so I could have his bed. I went to sleep. And suddenly, in the middle of the night, he raped me." It was a brutal experience that tested his philosophy, according to which behind every hatred, every outburst of violence, there is always pain, injury, trauma. He calls this "preemptive forgiveness." Holdt had learned this radical empathy and this idea of equality in childhood. His father was a pastor in Fĺborg, a village in southwestern Jutland.
"He was always preaching about love in church, so I think I was always trying to prove something to him."


IT WAS NOT EASY.  After the rape, he first moved in with one of the hippie girls. Only to be robbed by this gang a few days later after the party at the bus stop. That was also only the first of many times in his years as a vagabond in America that he encountered this violence. "I was constantly attacked by them with guns, with knives, or even just insults: 'Fuck off, you white motherfucker.'"


His parents could hardly believe what their son was describing to them in his letters from America. So they sent him a camera. It was a Canon Dial 35, not much bigger than a pack of cigarettes, with automatic exposure and a lever to set three different distances. He took more than 20,000 pictures with the camera, which still sits next to the desk in his study, as do the albums with black cardboard pages in which he collected his photos.

 

Nowhere did he encounter the implacability of this country with such harshness as in the Southern states. A deceptive beauty characterizes the fertile soil between Virginia and Texas, where the rise of the United States as an economic power began. The plantation fields and estates, the scent of magnolias, the Virginia oaks with their veils of Spanish moss, and the magnificent towns with their wooden buildings are the stuff of countless songs and novels romanticizing an old world. A world that ended in the history books with the abolition of slavery after the American Civil War more than a century and a half ago. But that was just in the books. What Jacob Holdt discovered in the workers' huts in North Carolina and Alabama was the continuation of historical atrocities that had begun with the displacement of African peoples across the Atlantic.


In America, native blacks had never been free since slavery," Holdt says. "They had internalized that. They were constantly told they were inferior. They told their own children that there was no hope for them." On the plantations for cotton, tobacco and oranges, they lived in oblong wooden shacks called shotgun houses, which were so shabby that even Americans who lived in the same counterparts would not believe that people lived like this in their country. Electricity and water were rare. Light came from kerosene lamps at night. Cooking was done on cast iron wood stoves. Holdt was one of the few whites who ever entered these houses, and he could always stay there for weeks at a time.


LOOKING at these pictures today, it is still hard to believe that this misery not only existed in the U.S., but that more than a hundred years after the end of slavery, it was one of the foundations of the prosperity of the richest nation in the world. Large corporations like Coca-Cola and the tobacco companies continue to profit from this misery quite directly today when they hire subcontractors who they don't spend a lot of time asking how they treat their workforce, whether they are located in China, Bangladesh or Alabama. "My photos can't show what I felt back then," Holdt says. He was never just an observer there, either. He lived in those shacks, made friends, moved in with families became the on-again, off-again lover of one of the workers. During the day, he helped in the fields, where they harvested crops for little money. "The pictures just don't show the cracks in the ground through which the wind passes and the snakes crawl into the house. You don't smell that harsh smell that's all over the houses there." Even the image of the girl standing in front of the old icebox, looking into the empty shelves, can only make you imagine the desperation that hunger brings. Real hunger that often drove people there in the south to eat the heavy clay to fill their stomachs.


In the "Black Belt" in Alabama, that Jacob Holdt had to learn that his well-intentioned visits could have cruel consequences. He stayed with Mary for a while. The young woman had lived from picking cotton and harvesting sugar cane since childhood. Her brother and son lived with her, "way out on a lonely Alabama road in a shack with no water or toilet, but at least electricity, a television that was often on, and an old refrigerator that looked good against the cardboard wall of the shack," he later wrote. And, "They were happy and restful days I spent there with her and her son John." But word soon spread in the area that there was a white man staying with a black woman. When he made a short trip, three whites threw a firebomb into her kitchen. Mary and John managed to escape. Their brother perished in the flames.

In the book, this story takes up only a page and a half. And yet Holdt's friendship and love for Mary remained until she died in 2014. He had visited her, cared for her and paid her medical bills as she became increasingly ill with cancer.

WHEN JACOB HOLDT returned to Denmark after five years of vagabond life, he began work on his book. In 1977, "American Pictures" appeared, first in Denmark, then in the rest of the world. The success was tremendous. Only in the U.S. did the book not appear. He soon realized that he could not tell his story with a book alone in such a way that it would change something in people. "I saw myself as a bridge builder between whites and blacks in a world that was completely divided." A slide show and lecture ended up being the form in which he felt he could make the most difference. It lasts five hours, a succession of images in which America's contrasts collide over and over again. The homes of junkies and the dinner parties of high society, the wooden shacks of plantation workers and the mansions of landowners, the harshness in the faces of whites and blacks, Native Americans and those in power. He plays music to accompany it, especially the track "Ship Ahoy" by the O'Jays, a soul anthem in which the band sings about the deportation of Africans across the sea. It's quite an effort to sit through the five hours. But he doesn't cut it any shorter. "If I just give an hour lecture there at the universities, the students have forgotten it the next day," he says "But if you sit down with people for four or five hours and show them these images until they're really shaken up enough to sign up for the racism workshop, then you've reached them." And not just students. Martin Luther King's daughter, Yolanda, performed with Holdt. James Baldwin, the legendary pioneer of African American literature, once traveled through a blizzard, seriously ill, to see and hear Holdt speak. Barack and Michelle Obama's Harvard Black Law Students Ass. invited him to Harvard University again and again. His lecture may have changed, but Jacob Holdt's message has remained.


NOW, IN THE YEAR 2022, he is no longer quite so world famous. Some people in Copenhagen still recognize him on the street, and in New York someone sometimes calls out to him "Ship Ahoy," the musical leitmotif of his picture lectures. But he has not yet found a publisher for his new book. "Roots of Oppression" it is to be called and will tell the whole story of his life and his paintings. "I think at the moment many are afraid of a white person telling the story of black people," he says.


But perhaps it has to do with the fact that Jacob Holdt has expanded the concept of oppression to include a group that, whether in the United States or the rest of the world, has few sympathizers. That is the men and women of the Ku Klux Klan. When he then goes on to say, "I didn't find them nearly as racist as all the students in America," the headwind is powerful. Yet Holdt has been concerned with this part of the U.S. from the beginning. When he left Mary for the short trip during which her home was set on fire, he was headed to a Ku Klux Klan meeting in Kentucky. What he found there was the fault line in a society that has never overcome its divisions. Today, perhaps even less than ever.


As for why he thinks most students are more racist than Ku Klux Klan members, Jacob Holdt explains, "Whites usually move away when there are too many blacks at the school in their neighborhood. The only whites who can't afford it are the poor whites. Most of the Klan members come from schools that were 95 percent black. They were too poor to move away, so they had all these black school friends. That's why the typical Klansman has a lot more close black friends than most whites."


A FEW YEARS AGO, Holdt once drove across the country with one of these Klansmen and introduced him to his black friends. Jeff Berry was his name, "Imperial Wizard" of the American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana. There is a Danish TV movie of this trip. There they also visit Mary in her new home in Alabama. When Jacob sits down with her and tells her who he has brought with him, she looks at him in horror and fear. But then they do sit down on her porch and talk. And Berry talks to more and more of those people he usually insults in this film. Until he gets to the point outside a café in New Orleans in a conversation with Jacob Holdt's black friend Ernest. That the very blacks and whites who live in poverty share a fate that they could fight much better together. They don't say it, but what they're addressing is this quintessentially American problem of racial conflict overshadowing class conflict. "My journey has taught me that I can no longer hate any person, any group, or any class anymore," Jacob Holdt says in a video he produced for social media two years ago at the height of protests against police violence. "Most of us are so wrapped up in our pain that it's easier to hate certain groups than to try to understand them, because that's how we avoid fighting the part in our system that we find in ourselves."

ONE HALF YEAR after the trip with Holdt, by the way, Jeff Berry left the Ku Klux Klan. The latter's son and some buddies brutally beat him up soon after during a barbecue. Even when his father was down, young Berry continued to kick him. Why they went after him has never been legally determined. Suspicions persist that Jeff Berry's departure from the Klan was considered treasonous. In a world founded on hate, Jacob Holdt's attitude of absolute neighborly love and forgiveness is a radical presumption. And it can have radical consequences. 
 




GEO author ANDRIAN KREYE knows the scenes depicted in Jacob Holdt's photos from his own experience: He lived for years as a correspondent in New York and has described the dark side of the American dream in reportages.

 

Photo texts

 

THE DREAM AND ITS DARK SIDE FIREWORKS
Since the beginning of the 20th century, the Ku Klux Klan has been celebrating its ritual of hatred. The burning crosses can be seen for miles around as a beacon and a threat. For Jacob Holdt, however, the Klansmen were also sufferers of history, much like their black victims Gadsden, Alabama, 1978



INHERITANCE OF GUILT

Holdt lived at times with the descendants of slaveholders, as here with Mrs. Barnett, who had just received a visit from a friend. He saw their racism not as hatred but as paternalistic love for their once-dependent Washington, Georgia, 1975 90

 

HUNGER

For Jacob Holdt, children in front of half-empty refrigerators became a symbol of the misery of the poor. He looked for this motif again and again because he knew it would immediately strike a nerve in Europe Pireway, North Carolina, 1975

 

JUSTICE

In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court declared the death penalty unconstitutional because it disproportionately affected blacks and the poor. Sections of the middle class disagreed and called for its reinstatement, as seen here at a petition drive.
New York City, New York, 1974


PARTYLAUNE
Transsexuals have always been a minority among minorities and lived with the ostracism of many classes. Good humor like at this party in the Tenderloin ghetto was often resistance to discrimination
San Francisco, California, 1974


ALL THE WAY UP

For a short time, Jacob Holdt hired himself out as a chauffeur for the left-liberal millionaire "Wild Bill" Gandall. This gave him an insight into a world that remains as closed to most Americans as the ghettos of the poor
Palm Beach, Florida, 1974


ALL THE WAY DOWN

Jacob Holdt met the two while waiting for friends in a bar. He had realized early on that wealth and skin color were not necessarily linked Jacksonville, Florida, 1974


THE CLOUVE

Even when he was no longer a vagabond, Jacob Holdt kept traveling to the United States. After the end of Ronald Reagan's presidency, he observed how the gap between rich and poor grew deeper and deeper.

New York City, New York, 1996

 

SHOTGUN SHACKS

In the Southern states, Jacob Holdt discovered the world of migrant and wage laborers. In their camps with their shotgun shacks, the time of slavery seemed to have never ended
Meridian, Mississippi, 1975

 

THE BEAUTY AND THE BEAST

For a time, Baggie and Jacob were a couple. He loved the woman and recorded her with her son during a program about the Senate hearings on Richard Nixon's Watergate scandal. She later went to prison for bank robbery

Greensboro, North Carolina, 1974


SPIRAL OF VIOLENCE

One night, Jacob Holdt witnessed a migrant worker next to him in a bar get stabbed. For the sheriff, the case was just everyday

Immokalee, Florida, 1974


IN THE SHADOW OF POWER

Every now and then, Holdt achieved images whose symbolic power had a lasting impact on viewers in Europe. For him, the junkies looking at the Capitol in Washington were an exemplary sign of how close power, wealth and misery are to each other in America Washington, D.C., 1973

 

FORBIDDEN LOVE

Nothing marks the brutality of a society as clearly as the persecution of love. Blacks and whites were allowed to be in relationships by law, but not by society's rules. Homosexual love, however, was not legal in every state until 2003
San Francisco, Calif. 1982


EMERGENCY

This 87-year-old woman from a poor settlement in Alabama always carried a revolver out of fear. Even when Jacob Holdt drove her 2,000 miles to Arizona, where she wanted to die. The long-haired hippie scared her

Notasulga, Alabama, 1975

 

BEAUTY IDEALS

Cynthia was a prostitute who helped Jacob Holdt find a place to stay. On one of her walks, she showed him what she thought of common images of women

Las Vegas, Nevada, 1975


 

ALIENATION

When Jacob Holdt lived for a while with an old, impoverished man in his cabin near Cape Canaveral, he managed to get this picture of a rocket launching into space over misery. He had been inspired by the poet and jazz musician Gil Scott-Heron, who in his song "Whitey on the Moon" described Nasa's space program as radically alienating America from its reality. What does the white man want on the moon, while his black fellow citizens decay in poverty?

Titusville, Florida, 1973

 

THE VAGABOND

On his years of travels through the USA, Jacob Holdt not only saw himself as an explorer and chronicler of a continent and its society. He also always had the urge to mediate. Between black and white, rich and poor, Europe and America. Slide shows became his medium, often lasting four or five hours. On purpose. He wanted to listen - to leave no escape into indifference. This earned him not only many fans, but also the admiration of people like writer James Baldwin (left, 3rd picture from top)

 



HEADLINES IN TEXT

 

FOR THE PEOPLE IN JACOB HOLDT'S PICTURES THERE IS NO FUTURE

 

CURRENT NEWS SHOWS THAT LITTLE HAS CHANGED IN AMERICA

 

AMERICANS DO NOT WANT TO BELIEVE THAT PEOPLE IN THEIR COUNTRY LIVE LIKE THIS

 

HOLDT COUNTERS HATRED WITH RADICAL LOVE FOR THE NEXT PERSON