Jacob Holdt: Museum Exhibitions
Home>> Jacob Holdt: Museum ExhibitionsFor years I resisted the idea of hanging my photos up on a wall without words. They should only be used in an educational context since many of them show human beings crushed by racism and could – without accompanying explanations – be used by hateful groups as well as by progressive forces.
But in recent years my wonderful French curators, Paul Cottin and Jerome Sother, who feel that many of my original snapshots have some artistic or historical value, have nevertheless managed to persuade me to make a number of exhibitions around Europe.
My curators Jerome Sother and Paul Cottin presenting
my new Steidl book to former president Vaclav Havel
I have even let them make a new book for me – a pure photo book published by Steidl – “liberated” from all my heavy racism explanations – and thus very different from my own main book, American Pictures.
Also they are selling a very fine portfolio with 16 of the my best photos. Here are some of the pictures with my background stories behind them:
People often ask me how I get to take such an intimate picture? Here’s my recipe: ever since my first year on the road, I had frequently been staying with Dorothy Yates, a big, fat mama in the Philadelphia ghetto. Her 14-year-old daughter Renee was fascinated by my vagabond stories and always pestering me to take her with me on the road. When she turned 16, I finally gave her permission, if she got her mother’s written permission. I knew how the police would react to a white hitchhiker with a black girl, but apart from endless sexual assaults by white truck drivers the trip went fine. Traveling through the South for a month, we built up a deep intimacy with each other, sharing beds or floor space every night. When I brought her back, as I’d promised her mother, Renee was so happy to see her boyfriend again that they jumped straight into bed. And because of the intimacy we now had, she never gave a second thought to my photographic presence during the entire act. So this is how you take pictures like this: just invite the subject hitchhiking with you for a month until she is ready. 1727 Manton St, Philadelphia, PA – November 1975
In Alabama, this poor 87-year-old woman asked me to drive her to Phoenix, Arizona. She wanted to go there to die. I helped her board up the windows of her tumbledown shack just outside Notasulga – the same town where the government once performed a deadly syphilis experiment on blacks. She knew she would never return, but still she tried to prevent local blacks from moving in. Even as we drove more than 2000 miles in five days, she sat there the whole time with her pistol in her hand – terrified of my long hair and beard. She was so frail that I had to carry her whenever we left the car, and even then she clung to her gun. She reminded me of an old lady I picked up many years later in Atlanta on one of my lecture tours. “Why are you hitchhiking?” I asked her. “Because they shut off the gas to my oven,” she said. She had tried to kill herself, but then they shut off her gas because she was too poor to pay the bills. Now she was hitchhiking 400 miles to Greensboro, where she knew her sister had a working gas oven. I always help my hitchhikers out, and so I chose to drive this almost 80-year-old woman straight to the oven. Tuskegee St., Notasulga, AL – September 1975
At present I thus have these major photo exhibitions traveling around European galleries:
1. “United States 1970-1975”
Poul Cottins and Jerome Soters selection of 240 more artistic type photos typically for smaller photo museums.
2. “Faith, hope and love”
This is the larger exhibition of 250 pictures curated by the renown Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark for larger art museums worldwide.
Read the catalogue here.
3. “The ghetto in our hearts”
This is my own educational exhibition consisting of 850 of my photos on racism, anti-Semitism, islamophobia, sexism, homophobia, class oppression etc. You will need an exhibition space of almost 1200 square meters since this is probably the biggest exhibition ever made on racism.
See an online version here (in Danish)
For questions on organizing it, you can contact me here.
4. “American Pictures – I just do things”
My latest exhibition in 2022 Cortona, Italy, has a new selection of photos curated by Lars Lindemann and Paolo Woods. They plan to exhibit it other places in Europe. You can see reviews and their choice of photos here.
Previous exhibitions in Europe and America.
Photos from previous exhibitions
Reviews of some of my recent exhibitions
Sincerely Jacob Holdt
Other pages under Exhibitions menu:
My complete photo gallery
My non-violent approach to photography
Sponsors of my travel photography
How I first published my photos in books while hitchhiking
A video made for MoMa Louisiana Museum about me
A British TV-interview about my years as a vagabond and how I made the photos.