Holdt shocked audiences
with his five-hour slideshows which showed
intimate and often nightmarish images. His
book "America Pictures" was first published
in 1977 and became a worldwide success. His
work has been shown in countless exhibitions
over the years. Braunschweig's Photography
Museum is currently showing his American
photographs in a co-exhibition with the
French photographer Jean-Christian Bourcart
entitled "Social Documents" which runs until
Feb. 28.
Among them are the
images of a young African-American girl
examining the interior of a completely
rotten and rusted refrigerator, or the
portrait of a bent-over old woman who tries
to keep her humble wooden shack clean with a
straw broom. The photos are a testimony to
poverty, violence and despair: a prostitute
shooting up, a fierce old white woman
guarding the entrance to her shack with a
gun, or a young African-American man who
cleans a valuable rifle in the midst of his
poverty.
He paid for these
pictures with his own blood, Jacob Holdt
likes to say, not without pathos. He arrived
in the US in the spring of 1970 with just
$40 in his pocket. He managed to keep his
head above water by donating blood plasma
twice a week, for $5 each time. Holdt, a
long-haired dropout with a plaited beard,
hitchhiked around and shared the lives of
people who were so hungry they ate cat food.
He lived with them under bridges or in
rat-infested shacks. His "financial
breakthrough," he later wrote, came "when an
elderly woman gave me $70 to drive her car
down to Florida."
Tearing Down Barriers
Holdt considered his
vagabond existence to be a reflection of his
philosophy of life, as an attempt to cast
himself on the mercy of his fellow humans.
He wanted to tear down barriers and win
people's confidence -- not exactly easy for
a white man in an African-American slum.
Holdt was ready to
skirt the borders of the legal and sometimes
even overstep them: He stole for crooks,
went on raids, smuggled weapons for Native
Americans and protested with them at Wounded
Knee in 1973. In doing so, the bourgeois,
but penniless European won the confidence of
people living in the margins of society.
Sometimes the fear and
the brutality of daily life in the ghetto
paralyzed him. In Detroit, the murder
capital of the United States at the time,
shots rang through the slums at night. Holdt
lived in a narrow wooden shack -- at dusk,
the inhabitants barricaded the door by
pulling a large refrigerator in front of it.
The radio played all night to scare off
burglars. "I am a nervous wreck," Holdt
admitted to his parents in a 1971 letter.
But he stayed nonetheless.
Holdt needed to endure
that intense lifestyle in order to capture
it in his breathtaking pictures. The Danish
hippie covered 161,265 kilometers (100,205
miles) in 48 states and stayed with 381
families. The proximity he tried to develop
proved to be dangerous sometimes: he was
robbed on four occasions and "bullets
whistled around" him in shootouts. He was
once ambushed by members of the Ku Klux
Klan, and was arrested or locked up six
times. Several of his closest friends were
killed during that six-year road trip.
'Ever-Increasing
Hatred'
Unsurprisingly perhaps,
this lifestyle further stoked his moral
outrage and cemented his worldview. Holdt
blames the capitalist system for the
explosive social divisions that he
witnessed. "Progressively," he wrote, "I
taught my camera to see the things that I
saw."
Holdt started to
understand reverse racism: "The longer I
live here, the more I look at the whites
with the eyes of the blacks, and I can't
help but harbor an ever-increasing hatred
for them," he wrote. He viewed the southern
plantation owners, on whose cotton fields he
labored, as modern day slaveholders.
Capitalism, he believed, kept racism alive
intentionally. He saw the black murderer he
lived with in New Orleans as a victim; he
felt admiration for drug addicts, and all
downtrodden Americans that nevertheless
maintained their will to live. With a nod to
Ben E. King's song Spanish Harlem, he wrote
that whoever escaped the ghetto, "was a rose
that grew through the concrete."
Holdt also documented
the rich side of America -- perhaps, because
the contrast made the injustice seem even
starker. He photographed the villas of the
white upper crust with the same calm and
objectivity as he shot the shacks of the
black lower classes. But he knew which side
he was on: "Whenever I got a chance to live
the so-called good life, it usually made me
so sick that I quickly fled out again to the
highway."
Jacob perceived America
as a "boring white middle class country"
before he arrived in 1970. What he found was
very different: a poor, oppressed populace
that somehow, miraculously, persevered and
overcame. He captured that struggle in his
photographs and writings.