The Book

International bestseller

The book based on the multi-media show was an international bestseller.

In Scandinavia it sold per capita the equivalent of 3 million copies in America.
In Germany “Bilder aus America” was the longest running foreign book on Der Spiegel’s bestseller list ever. 

In its personal and gripping tone many teachers in anthropology, sociology and political science find it an important tool “to help bring human life to the teaching” of their students.

High lights from the book

In this illustrated odyssey of 800 photos, Jacob Holdt described his experiences at the Wounded Knee uprising, with drug addicts in “shooting galleries”, and in projects with welfare mothers. 

He also depicts the friendships he developed with transvestites and transsexuals; the violence and murders he witnessed; his own arrest by the FBI; and his startling encounters with the opposite extreme of American society, including the Rockefeller family and the Kennedy family.

A modern Jacob Riis

The book is a forceful reminder that the poverty and inhuman living conditions which were so brilliantly exposed a hundred years before by Holdt’s fellow Dane, Jacob A. Riis, in his classic study, “How the Other Half Lives,” continue to exist.

The book was self-published by American Pictures Foundation in order to enable the street criminals and the actual people portrayed in the book to sell it.

The book is now sold out since I – the author – lost too much money selling it that way. The Danish version was in 2016 updated right up to president Obama’s time and waits for an American publisher to re-publish it. But you can read his online version here:

Now an updated version of the book will soon be published.
“The Ghetto in our Hearts – a 50 year personal journey into black/white history”
is based on my continuing friendship with those I photographed as a young vagabond.

Or read my memoirs “On saying yes” about how I young and naive arrived in America
and ended up somehow “making it”.