Once the needle goes in it never comes out. The phrase doesn't really belong here because it's not Jacob Holdt's (Larry Clark coined it, in the preface to his 1971 'junkie' photobook Tulsa). It could still serve as a motto to Holdt's work because Nixon-and-Heroin America appears at its most intense in his photographs. Once the needle goes in it never comes out: what really makes Holdt's legendary book American Pictures (1977) resemble a drug experience are his most sober representations of violent poverty.

At first there's the sheer organic force of these images. In response a hard, dark knot begins to form in the stomach. That knot grows, tightens, grows again. While looking at some of these images it is entirely possible to work oneself into an almost aggressive "Forget the whole theory-laden-postmodern photography"-attitude or into a state of "Here, in these photos, truth exists"-excitement and toward the conviction that Holt's old-fashioned ways of seeing can teach us all kinds of things for the early 21st century, can provide us with an ethics of observation, are in fact calling out to us to stop taking apart authenticity in our superintelligent, bloodless fashion and to start looking at the mangled Body of Man, at the victims of our lifestyle, at hundreds of children killed by rat's bites in 1970s Chicago (Children!!! Bitten By Rats!!!), to consider this endlessly saddening thing called human dignity which lives on in hunger, loneliness and debris – lives on forever and doesn't leave us any choice at all but to a) praise it, time and again praise it, and b) stop distrusting realism, because it's doing exactly that (it's praising human dignity), and c) stop the foolish questioning of liberal humanism (what else have we got, after all: the wonderful values of the Taliban?), and finally d) to muster a true, real, and momentous form of compassion for the Other – and Jacob Holdt could be a saint in this procession of the just, walking briskly in front with his cheap, banged-up camera, a man blessed with what our forefathers called the incorruptible eye (also known as concerned photography or simply as the desire to show the world as it is instead of bubble wrapping it in protective layers made of questionings-and-questionings-of-the-questionings) and behind him would follow (why not, the day may come) a new generation of intellectuals who do not see poverty as a discursive construction, a generation hurt by these pictures, really hurt, a generation starting to move and to improve the world, now.

Slowly, though. Slowly. The story begins with a Danish preacher's son. A young and adventurous man, he crossed the US on his way to an extended vacation in South America. Something or other kept him there. And then the counter culture sucked him in, the antiwar movement, Afro-America.

This was when the five most important years of his life began. Holdt stayed with the poor and the rich, the white and the black. He slept with the poor and the rich, the white and the black. He discussed things, asked questions, took drugs, accepted charities, and wrote long letters home. Because his parents didn't believe his descriptions of the conditions in the United States, they sent him a simple camera – the one he then used to shoot American Pictures. He created his book years later, back in Denmark, putting it together in a hurry because a Danish publisher saw potential in his story shortly before the Frankfurt book fair. American Pictures combines travel writing, agit-prop, political essays, photography, and adventure tales. Above all it's cheaply produced. Holdt's color pictures are mostly rendered in black and white. And they are crowded in by masses of text.

When the photographs stand for themselves, as they do here, freed of the words around them and returned to the strange colors of their time, it is possible to discover Jacob Holdt as an exceptionally gifted photographer. Masterfully he renders scene, gesture, and face. He creates high art using low tech, like a prodigy playing flamenco on a plastic guitar.

The catch is this: Holdt doesn't care at all. He's been touring the world for almost thirty years, giving lectures, showing his pictures. He never uses them to prove his fantastic eye. They are always just teaching material against racism and injustice.

Because hardly anyone is able to imagine a life like that, Holdt is frequently depicted as dogmatic and obsessed with his project. Incorrect. Holdt has been thinking about the limits of his work from the very beginning. In the very preface to American Pictures, he states how little enthusiasm he feels about making a book. It would not help those he cared about, Holdt suspects, and it might even disrupt his ties to the people he wants to talk to. Holdt's writings repeatedly come back to these doubts. He considers, for instance, the difficulties of handling a topic like hunger. In a chapter about Alabama and Mississippi he notes how hard it is to get close to starving children so afraid of strangers. He wants to photograph hunger, but he adds that most of the children he sees are not obviously emaciated. Hence American Pictures shows a girl looking at a ghastly open refrigerator, presents close-ups of crying children and a snapshot of a haggard dog. The actual hunger of human beings remains invisible. Holdt's text, in fact, is much more effective than any picture. He describes how he accompanies a young woman to a clay pit where she digs up food for herself and her son, "Do you always eat dirt?" he asks. She says, "Every now and then." "Does it taste good?" he asks. "Excellent" she says. Then she asks Holdt ("in bewilderment," as he notes): "Have you never eaten it?"

Holdt frequently and deliberately displays his foreignness and the gaps in his understanding. To him New York, for instance, ranks as "a city which simply does not permit any human being to be human." The city's rich white liberals seem as shocked as he is by the things he has seen. But their "enormous fear of Negroes and the way they are" – as Holdt puts it – keep them from the "threshold" he has crossed. He sees these white liberals as "buffer troops of capitalism" who handle every form of criticism by simply absorbing it into the system. Filled with self-accusation he describes himself as "just as hypocritical as these art snobs," because he "waters down" his own criticism and thus turns his reportage into "paternalistic chit-chat."

Jacob Holdt was attacked half a dozen times during his travels through America. He was threatened by policemen and bullied by the Ku Klux Klan. Yet this moment in New York seems like the lowest point of his expedition. No act of violence or hostility depresses him as much as the certainty that a privileged audience will smugly integrate his reports into the cultural mainstream. His shocking pictures fulminate to nothing. The city takes one quick look and then goes on as before.

Obsession is an ugly word. So is addiction. But something comparable is driving Holdt, something unrelated to irony, distance or double standards, something that renders him an absolute alien in the sarcastic art world. Once the needle goes in it never comes out: Holdt seems driven by this insatiable longing for contact. During his five American years, he was looking for it on mattresses, in sleeping bags, among sharecroppers and in urban slums. He's still looking for it, and finding it, even today, as a lecturer constantly on the road with his slide shows, hoping to help young audiences battle the fear of the Other. Even after all these years he continues to fight for the protagonists of his pictures.

His photographs, however, could use some protection as well. Jacob Holdt's story looks like a, well, difficult case in contemporary art. To summarize briefly: here's this white, Northern European man, free, independent, equipped with all middle-class privileges. Driven by exhilaration and moralistic excitement, he sets out to shoot a couple of thousand pictures of the life and suffering of black America. This constitutes a problem in so many ways right there, because every white observer of the non-white, no matter how generous, high-spirited, long-haired, will always frame things from the point of view of the powerful. The title of honorary black man doesn't exist, no matter how many have applied. And doesn’t Holdt exoticize the black body here? It could almost be read as a fetish, the views of nudity indications of primitivism, and the photographic act as a re-humiliation of those already humiliated by poverty.

There's something else. The American concept of an "underclass" only developed in the 1980s when American Pictures reached the height of its popularity. For sociologist Herbert Gans, the term served to newly stigmatize poverty. It became a frighteningly effective instrument in the "war against the poor," as Gans puts it, a war American society has now been waging for decades, Gans states. Calling the needy the 'underclass' (instead of simply 'poor people') makes it possible to justify their not being normal, their not belonging with 'us'. How does Holdt prevent his work from being enlisted in this campaign, an undertaking directed not so much against poverty, but against the poor? Don't we observe his subjects as if through a laboratory's windowpanes? Sometimes they are naked, sometimes they are hurt, but 'our' kind of privacy they do not possess.

And look at all this imprecision, the – imaginary – art snob says. On the one hand, Holdt’s project makes all these claims for authenticity. On the other hand, any layman can see that he is staging scenes, using dramatic lighting, creating allegorical situations. That simply doesn't add up, the art snob says. In photography everything must be a lie or nothing. There's something fishy about the ambassador of truth working away on melodramatic effects.

Holdt thus fails miserably in every possible art critic's test. That, however, may also mean that these categories are misplaced here. Aesthetics? Holdt isn't interested. Concept? Strategy? No need. He wants his pictures to be tools, hard and robust like carjacks. His love is greater than all academic doubts.

And then he goes and takes himself apart again and again, in moments of self-criticism, frustration, and despair. "The only thing that has any meaning for me in my journey," he writes in a letter, "is being together with these lonesome and ship-wrecked souls. My photographic hobby is really, when all is said and done, nothing more than an exploitation of the suffering, which will probably never come to contribute to an alleviation of it."

It's probably not an accident that a Dane has written the most precise study of Jacob Holdt’s work to date. Ole Bech Petersen from the University of Odense sees Holdt as one of various Danes sallying out to discover, describe and occasionally even change America. Jacob Riis ranks as one of these figures, of course: the other famous Danish photographer of American poverty, first a poor immigrant, then the key explorer and chronicler of New York's late 19th century slums. (Both Jacobs hail from the same part of Jütland, but Holdt hadn’t heard of his predecessor until 1975, when he saw and stole a Riis photo book from a book shop in San Francisco.) Riis dedicated his whole life to New York. Today a city park in Rockaway, Queens, bears the reformer's name. Holdt’s struggle, though fought with similar passion, cannot be tied to one place. According to Petersen, his method should be called "fatalist travel."

That is a handy concept. Holdt is no alpha male going exploring, but a man surrendering himself unremittingly and with no misgivings: politically, emotionally, and sexually. Holdt gets so close to people that he himself begins to dissolve. This makes him vulnerable. But it's the only way to feel out the vulnerability of others. Holdt visits Wounded Knee, for instance, an insurgent Indian reservation, and one night shares a mattress and long, wet French kisses with a Sioux leader. The next day he falls in love with a girl in "red clogs," a Tipoix Indian. Another couple of days later, the pregnant wife of a man just killed by the police slips into his sleeping bag, remaining there until the Sioux leader interrupts the intermezzo. Holdt’s life makes the most exciting Bohemian existence seem like a tranquil river. Time and again his vita generates heroic and not so heroic anecdotes (Holdt briefly works as a bouncer in a New York bar, accidentally kicks out Bob Dylan and gets himself fired; in Denmark in 1992 an incorrect rumor that he is a KGB agent makes it to the front pages of national newspapers). His long-term project in photography, though, is not about Holdt himself, but about complete surrender, the most intimate picture, the total dissolution in the Other.

As Ole Bech Petersen states, America provides a kind of escapist fantasy for Holdt. The photographer once described his fellow Danes as "people of an evil, degenerated, conformist, contaminated, inhumane human nature," people at home in a "kingdom of evil." But he is not the high priest of anti-Americanism the early 21st century would like to cast him as. He always liked the US and still likes it. He calls America his second home, loving its hospitality, tolerance toward eccentricity, and optimism. The end of his journey was marked by depression – owing to his disastrous marriage to an American woman, the murder of a friend, but naturally and above all to social injustice and misery. The American impressions didn't just rank as material for Holdt. They changed his life. But he felt completely misunderstood when his book was read as mere criticism of American racism in Denmark, and not as a universal project on any kind of racism, including the Danish version. Over and over, in each new edition of the book, he pointed out the necessity of applying the lessons his work teaches to a European context. Holdt’s obvious fascination with America probably works against this intention, however (and Ole Bech Petersen makes a similar point). The images are too powerful for viewers to quickly relate them to their European lives. His America is far too dark and far too bright. That's what makes it unforgettable.

Holdt’s crazy, naïve, and merciless view of the US is by far not as marginal or even typically Old World as European readers like to assume. In early seventies American photography, everything revolved around courage, morality, rebellion. East 100th Street came out in 1970, Bruce Davidson’s photo book about a street in East Harlem, one of the poorest urban neighborhoods in America at the time. Every single one of Davidson's pictures is marked by a wild, naïve love for this slum. Larry Clark's Tulsa was published the following year, a story from the heart of America and its drug culture, seen as all the more shocking because the photographer didn't play the role of outside observer, reporting instead from the center of the self-destructive excess and self-destruction. Diane Arbus’s suicide in 1971 and the Arbus retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art a year later established the meditation on weirdness as photography's trademark. Danny Lyon presented Conversations with the Dead, a photo series from a state prison in the South. Lyon combined portraits and intimate studies of day-to-day life behind bars with an elaborate autobiographical text of a rapist serving time. The work is characteristic of its historical moment. Either delinquents tell their stories. Or the photographer becomes the delinquent himself.

Certainly more sober and distanced approaches to photography also developed in the 1970s. Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz devised a new, laconic image of the American West, William Eggleston drove color photography forward with a smile. Bill Owen’s impressions in Suburbia are tame in comparison. When the straightness of suburban landscapes itself causes paranoia and depression, however, these studies of the everyday also come very close to the brink of insanity. And even the great master of mainstream photojournalism crossed over to the dark side in these years. W. Eugene Smith, born in the last year of World War I, moved from the US to Japan in September 1971. Smith wasn't looking for inner peace – he started to work on his career's grimmest project, a study of the deformities and diseases that pained the population of Minamata. The bodies of the portrayed had been poisoned, their faces disfigured by the mercury from a local chemical plant. Smith looked for dramatic shadows in his pictures. Liveliness becomes an illusion. No more than hints of his figures show from the dark. As the cover of Minamata announced in 1975, Smith’s series tells the story of the "poisoning of a city." To the minds of the documentary photographers of the Nixon years, however, not only Minimata was poisoned, but the present in itself, the capitalist world, the United States in the final third of the 20th century.

Photographers of these years thus traveled through a scary, yet inspiring world. At the same time as Jacob Holdt, though on different American roads, a 25-year-old former assistant film editor accompanied a troop of carnival strippers on their tours in rural New England and the South. Susan Meiselas, soon to become a Magnum member, invested in immersion, in closeness, profiting from being the same age as most of the dancers she portrayed. Like Holdt, Meiselas spent many years of her life on the project. She listened. She participated. She recorded 150 hours of interviews. Finally, she produced Carnival Strippers, like American Pictures a culminating point in the history of the photo book, and also a study of nakedness, grotesqueness, the dark. In terms similar to Holdt's, Meiselas distrusted the book medium because she thought it made it all too easy for readers to distance themselves. But in contrast to the radical Danish moralist, whose life knows only one project, Meiselas thought like a journalist. She submerged herself in the stripper world and then she re-emerged. The story began and came to an end and so let something else begin. American Pictures, which started almost four decades ago, is still in progress. Its author is still fighting the same battle.

In the early seventies it was still possible to cross social and ethical thresholds with a quasi-youthful naiveté, to grow as a person in the process and to confront the world with its own ignorance and narrow-mindedness. This thrilled photographers because it made their tours of discovery significant and their presence and observations more intense. Certainly the relationship between the photographer and the photographed posed problems. The reporters were able to get out of the whole business (the strip clubs, the slums, the prisons) at any given moment to go back to their own reality. Their protagonists had to go on bearing poverty, violence, and humiliation because their lives happened to last longer than the time it takes to finish a photographic project. Holdt saw this problem very early on and gave up taking pictures for a while. But then, apparently, America promised too much.

When American Pictures came out in Denmark it thus blended seamlessly with the classic phase of passionate photographic realism. But it was almost a little late. In 1977 the Age of Irony had already begun: Cindy Sherman had made her first Untitled Film Still. Why should photographers now continue to take real trips to real, cruel worlds? Photography was produced in the studio; it was produced in the mind. Sherman pinpointed what the photographers of the early 1970s had only sketched with their travelogues, metamorphoses, and taboo-breaching – the notions that identity was mutable, all roles flexible, no nightmare too alien. She took this conceptual mixture to her laboratory and started to distill it. She let reality evaporate (and, along with it, the actual, living strippers, sharecroppers, racists and also the suffering children), invented postmodern photography, and turned into the icon of smart thinking in college classrooms and museum cafés alike. Her work was a symptom of a world-view that all too readily preferred the subversive gesture to political action (according, for instance, to Terry Eagleton in After Theory). The body wasn't interesting if it was hungry or hurt. It was read instead, depending on the moment's mood, as a phantasma, a gendered construction or a cyborg, as exotic or erotic, hip or hybrid. Susan Sontag notes in Regarding the Pain of Others how this kind of thinking also begot the "breath-taking provincialism" that the reality of suffering is nothing more than a spectacle of media representations.

Perhaps we really should imagine Jacob Holdt as the antithesis of this era. Jacob is Jacob, in 1970, 1978 and 2007, on whatever street and on whatever mattress. He's Jacob and he's never someone else. He never reinvented his gnarly self. The postmodern came and the postmodern went, but he is still around. He believes in Good. He's staring at Evil. Once the needle goes in it never comes out.

Eagleton, Terry. After Theory. London: Allen Lane, 2003.

Gans, Herbert J. The War Against the Poor: The Underclass and Antipoverty Policy. New York: BasicBooks, 1995.

Petersen, Ole Bech. "The Fatalistic Hobo: Jacob Holdt, Touring, and the Other Americans." American Studies International 38:1 (2000): 4-25.

Roth, Andrew et al. The Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century. New York: PPP Editions, 2001.

Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, 2003.