Introducing Jacob Holdt as featured in All over the place! curated by William A. Ewing.
 
 

 
As a young 20-something, JACOB HOLDT first traveled to the U.S. for what he calls a short visit and ended up staying over five years. In that time, he hitchhiked across the country, photographing racism and oppression. Upon returning home, Holdt culled his images into a book, film, and exhibition titled, American Pictures. While a household name in Europe, it’s a wonder why Holdt, with his trademark beard, isn’t a more well-known name in the US. American Pictures was and continues to be a success that has led him on myriad paths since. He’s garnered comparisons to Jacob Riis, had run-ins with the KGB, the Carter administration, and Jane Fonda. He continues to lecture throughout the world, and to really get the full story on Holdt—past, present, and future—please visit www.american-pictures.com.
 
NYPH: Did you always an inclination toward photography? Had your parents not given you a camera, might you have never picked this up?
I never photographed before I came to the USA, but my father did take slides during vacations to use for his slide talks, mostly for people in old people’s homes, since he was a pastor.
No, if my parents had not sent me a cheap little half-frame camera after half a year on the road, I am sure that I would never have started photographing. Remember, I came to the USA with only $40. That money lasted for five years due to the American hospitality, but would not have been enough for a camera. The films I financed from selling blood plasma twice weekly paying $5 each time, although I hitchhiked 16 times to the blood bank in New Orleans, where they paid the highest in the nation, $6.10.
 
When you were a child, what did you hope to be when you grew up?
I had absolutely no clue. The school doctor once asked the same question and I am said to have answered, “A good example,” in my rural dialect which at the time was looked down at. So everybody broke out laughing for, “How could anything good come out of a person who couldn’t even speak proper Danish?” I think that kind of discrimination made me early on identify strongly with American blacks with their ghetto English.
 
Do you still hitchhike?
Yes, occasionally. You see, I have spent 34 years of my life driving endlessly on the highways to present my slideshow more than 6,500 times in 14 countries. It feels like a prison to sit lonesome in a car. So, when I don’t have to bring all my equipment, I find freedom in hitchhiking, which is the best way to meet people. My son is doing even better in terms of fighting global heating than I me. He hitchhikes all the time and uses any small vacation to see a new country. He hitchhiked from Denmark trough Iran and Pakistan to Shanghai in China for $65 and later all of the Muslim world and Latin America, just as cheap although his favorite is the former Soviet republics. Only in the USA does he not like to hitchhike—the only place in the world where he was violently attacked.
 
What is one of your favorite spots in the US?
I would say my favorite place is the deep South, where I just traveled around again these last two weeks to see and continue photographing the people who took me in during the ’70s. When my friends move away in the South I can usually find them again by asking around. In the “cold” urban north, friends are easily lost forever when they move, because people don’t know each other here and there is no central registry such as in Europe through which you can find your lost friends.
 
When was the last time you shaved your beard?
During the first weeks when I was in the army in 1966. Since then, the army allowed soldiers to have long hair and beards, and I never cut either ever after. My beard really works well for me as a photographer among children in the Third World, but in my book I have many more explanations for looking like a fool. By lowering yourself as a “fool,” you allow your photographic subjects to come “on top” of yourself psychologically. That makes them loosen up much faster.
 
Lastly, what will you presenting at your slide show? Why is your presentation the “must-attend” presentation of the Festival?
I didn’t know anything about the Festival since photography never interested me. Photography was for me only a tool for social change. I was just told that you present me as “historical figure”, which made me laugh since I am extremely well known in Denmark for my present social activism for speaking up for our ghettoized Muslim population in the same way I, for 34 years, have spoken up for the black ghettoes in American universities. My slideshows usually last five to six hours or a whole school day—or in American universities five hours in the evening followed by my racism workshop next day. It is now for the first time digitalized. The first two hours of it can be seen on my website: www.americanpictures.com/video/american-pictures/index-us.htm
 
I will do a little Powerpoint presentation about how I have used my photography to create social change and about what happened later in the violent lives of the people I photographed in my “vagabond years” in the ’70s. Telling the story of their lives is a way of showing American history, from the post civil rights oppression to Obama! If there is time I will also talk about my work to change the Ku Klux Klan from within, as crazy as it sounds!
 
Is anyone writing your biography and/or screenplay of your life and work? Are you still avoiding Hollywood?
Several publishers have asked me to in Denmark, but right now I am working on an updated version of my book American Pictures, which can be used for teaching about oppression in all other countries with severe oppression, such as my own Denmark, where the book for many years has been a school textbook. As for Hollywood, well, when Hollywood promoters saw my slideshow in Jane Fonda’s house in 1978, they immediately wanted to “blow it up big in 76 bigger cities….we will make you a superstar…put you on the Johnny Carson show”. It really jarred in my ears, so I said that I needed to think about it and first wanted to go around to all the people I had photographed and discuss it with them. And since then, I never returned the phone calls from Hollywood, even from Universal Studios. I felt at the time that I would be selling out my friends. It is so easy for a photographer to achieve personal success by exploiting the poor. What matters is to make it a success for the poor themselves! Since then American Pictures became a big hit in Europe, in the Cannes Festival, and I spent all the money on funding the apartheid movement in South Africa and Namibia. However, when I learned from the KGB that they wanted to use my book and movie in an all out effort against President Carter’s human rights policies—by showing that human rights were just as bad in the USA as in Russia—I decided to kill both my book and the movie worldwide in order not to damage Carter’s important policies around the world. That way my enormous income at the time quickly dried up and also put a break on many of the big projects I had started in Africa. So, yes, today I could probably use a serious Hollywood offer.
 
By “serious” I mean the same as with my relationship to the publishing world. I had several offers from American publishers in the ’80s, but realized that none of them had a single black high-level employee. So instead of supporting such of institutionalized racism, I decided to publish my book myself in order to let the people photographed in my book sell it along with the homeless and street people in the ghettos. Soon I had a whole network of homeless, criminals selling my book in many of the big cities as an alternative to selling dope. Although I didn’t make much money, three of my street sellers were killed before they paid me off. I must say I have never had so much fun as when I was delivering books to all those people. So, photography should not only be a tool for change, I feel, it should also be fun!
 
—Tami Mnoian