American Pictures
Jacob Holdt
Jacob Holdt is a Danish photographer born in 1947 in Copenhagen. He gained international fame in 1977 with his book American Pictures for its effective photographic revelations about the hardships of America’s lower classes.
In the spring of 1970 he traveled to Canada. He planned to hitchhike across America from Canada to Latin America. But he never made it. In the United States, he was robbed. So he got stuck in the US. For the next five years Holdt hitchhiked 100.000 miles. During his trips, he met and lived with many people. From gangsters to prostitutes, to drug addicts, killers, Klan members, Rockefellers, the poorest black families from the ghettos and America’s impoverished of all kinds. More than 350 families offered him a place to stay. He was shocked and fascinated by the social differences he encountered.
He took fifteen thousand photographs revealing the devastating living conditions in the ghettos, the hopeless life in shacks, severe poverty, raging racism, violence and famine, contrasting with the lavish life of the rich. His work captured the daily struggle of the American underclass and contrasts it with images of the life of America’s elite.
Upon returning to Denmark he put together a slide series from his photos. He started lecturing about the social differences in the United States, The screening quickly became an international success. He published his book American Pictures which just as his lectures became an international success: a bestseller in several countries. When he learned that the KGB where planning to use his book to demonstrate that human rights were violated just as egregriously in America as in Russia, he stopped the release of his book in other countries. So the book was only published in Denmark, Germany, Holland and Scandinavia, where they already had contracts. Mine is a Dutch copy.
American Pictures is a personal account of his hitchhiking journeys across the United States, where he became more and more involved with the poor underclass, both black and white, that exists in the world’s most prosperous country. Holdt’s words and pictures, unsophisticated, raw, yet heartfelt give a personal, sometimes naive analysis of the racism and class inequalities in American society. Holdt’s thesis is that racism is a deep-rooted social problem, difficult to eradicate, tied not only to cultural but also economic factors.
Poverty in the US and the widening gap between rich and poor is still a problem as Matt Black shows us in his book American Geography.
American Pictures is a laudable attempt to make a didactic account using words and pictures at a time when even photographers who considered themselves in the documentary mode were perhaps a little too seduced by ‘art’, at the expense of traditional, social documentary values. Jacob Holdt has never been interested in photography as art. All photos have been taken for a narrative on racism, with simple, quickly grasped motives. American Pictures is much more in the tradition of Let Us Praise Famous Men with words from James Agee and pictures from Walker Evans. Or Have You Ever Seen Their Faces with words by Erskine Caldwell and pictures by Margaret Bourke-White.
American Pictures
Photographer: Jacob Holdt
Originally published in 1977 by Informations Forlag, Copenhagen
Paperback, 24,2 x 20 cm, 272 pages
Numerous colour and b&w photographs, b&w illustrations and newspaper cuttings
Text by Jacob Holdt
Mentioned in The Photobook: A History, Volume 2. Edited by Martin Parr and Gerry Badger.