For 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.

Mainly, I guess, because they both are very sweet and fun to work with while they try their best to convince museum spectators (and myself) that I am actually some kind of artist in disguise :-)
 

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.
 

At present I thus have two 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.
To arrange an exhibition  or

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.
Curated by Mette Marcus and Erik Steffensen and covering United States from 1970-2009.
Further information.
To arrange this exhibition, contact mail@louisiana.dk . 

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.

Previous exhibitions in Europe and America.

See a video made for Louisiana Museum about me as a photographer

A British TV-interview about my years as a vagabond and how I made the photos.


Sincerely Jacob Holdt
 

  This page in Danish

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