CONVERSATION BETWEEN Arthur Jafa: I saw your slide show in a university in Washington DC in the 1980s and it made an indelible impression on me. When I talked about doing an exhibition with the Louisiana museum in Denmark, they sent the Louisiana Channel to videotape me in my studio in LA. And they brought me your book American Pictures as a gift and asked if I happened to know it. And I just started laughing, because I have several copies of it – I buy extra copies for friends every time I see it in a book store. The main thing that I was struck by from the first time I saw the book was that I just had never seen images that I felt were as accurate in their renderings of the South that I knew. I grew up in Clarksdale, Mississippi, in the middle of the Delta. I love William Eggleston’s work quite a bit. And it’s obviously very great work as political photography. But I always felt like there’s a wall of aestheticism between what it is he takes pictures of and the work itself. And that’s not a critique, that’s just a part of his work. But I just had never seen images of the South before I saw your pictures, outside of my family’s photo albums – that would be like the only equivalent of it. If I had to put one question to you it would be how did you get these pictures? How did you manage the level of intimacy or access? Jacob Holdt: That’s a long, long story. First of all, I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing in America at the time. I came hitchhiking down (from Canada) on my way to Latin America. And it seemed like from the first day, the blacks were taking me by the hand – both in a positive, loving way and also at a gunpoint. I was held up at gunpoint and raped by a black homosexual on the first day in America. I’ve never told it in my book, it was actually at the Louisiana museum the first time I talked about one night because I had such a shame for years and years. But I realized now that if that had not happened, I would not have ended up in America, because I felt I had to connect with this anger (to understand it). But I think an important answer to your question is to travel with no money. I came to America with $40 in my pocket, and they lasted for five years due to the enormous hospitality of Americans. The question for me daily was how to get in and stay with people. And the minute you’re staying with people making your way in one way or another, then it’s easy for any fool to take some pictures. And little by little the project grew.
I’ll
also say it took me a couple of years to learn not to fear the gang
guys I met, because I was attacked at gunpoint again and again the
first two years and it creates fear in you. That’s one of the
reasons I have related to white racism since then.
AJ:
Those are some fundamental insights. I’ve worked for most of my
adult life as a cinematographer, particularly on documentaries, so
I’ve been to a lot of different places. People who don’t have a lot
are always trying to get what they need, but they’re not demons. In
my own particular upbringing in the Delta, which is outside of the
Appalachians in the poorest region in America, I feel like poverty
was more defining than culture, so to speak, or even race. The
culture grows out of the poverty, or is inflected or deflected or
shaped by the poverty. JH: (laughing) What was your father’s deeper problems with the pictures? AJ: I never had a conversation with him about it afterwards, I felt like I had to respect his experience. I think it was too close to my dad’s experiences, what he saw in the book was what he grew up around and what he had protected me from. I had learned to appreciate the pictures as aesthetical formulations, because I developed a real sensitivity to the things that black people do that are not mainstream. There’s a kind of genius on display when people do things that are not what the ideal is. A lot of times people have a relationship to certain kind of images, but it’s distanced. Pictures allow people to be close to things they are attracted to, but the pictures can’t reach out and touch you. The most powerful pictures actually move you despite the fact that the people in the picture can’t reach their hand out and touch you. In terms of the proximity of your photos, I guess I realized that those pictures were not pictures that could be taken at a distance. Even if you had a telephoto lens, it wouldn’t be the same thing.
JH:
I had problems almost daily when I made shoots, especially around
the South. Sometimes I was picked up by black middle-class people.
And I had made my little picture books with some of my pictures and
I showed them these pictures, so hopefully they would give me a
little donation. But often they got pissed and said “Don’t you see
anything beautiful in black people?” What, I’d said, I saw them and
tried to show them as oppressed people. I felt that if white people
had to understand what they’re causing, how they oppressed black
people, they have to see pictures and the stories about how their
racism destroyed human beings. Only that way could I hope to
deconstruct the negative stereotyping which fueled their racist
thinking. And that view is something I’ve really been reinforced in
by seeing exactly the same here in our relationships to immigrants
here in Denmark. Here too we see how those we marginalize end up in
gangs and so on. AJ: I say I’ve never seen images like this of black people, for sure. I’m talking about the unvarnished rendering of black people’s lives, how black people were living, the pain, the anger, all of that. But I also have to say, there are images of black love and intimacy, that are in those same pictures. There’s a famous picture that you took – or at least it is famous in my own little Pantheon – of a black man at the top of the stairs with a black woman, and they’re nude. Nobody’s ever taken a picture of black love like that before. JH: Yes, that’s René Yates in Philadelphia. I knew her since she was 13. I stayed with her mom Dorothy in Philadelphia and every year I came back and I told stories about hitchhiking all over America. “Take me with you, take me with you”, René said. But you are too young, I said. Then once when she was 16, I finally said, Okay, if you can get your mother’s written permission, because I knew what could happen when hitchhiking with a black woman, I had often enough seen that kind of aggressive sexism from drivers when I hitchhiked with black women. René got the written permission from her mother, and we took off. And then we hitchhiked for two months around to visit some of her family down in Richmond and the playboy millionaires and all over the place. Night after night, we shared beds, wherever we could sleep, but it was never a sexual relationship. But we developed an intimacy with each other. And after two months, we came back and she was so happy to see her boyfriend again, and because of the intimacy we had gradually developed, she didn’t even think of me standing there photographing them in bed. This is the way you take such a picture: you take the woman on the highways for a couple of months to soften her up. AJ: (laughing) I will try to apply that on my next project. You say you never considered yourself as a photographer. And I can accept that in the beginning, but at a certain point you have taken thousands of pictures and then you are a photographer, it’s impossible not to be. And I’m wondering if there was ever a moment where you had taken an account for kind of shift internally in your relationship to taking images of the people. At a certain point, it’s not to say you’re no longer a participant, but you know, you are a photographer. I’m wondering if you could just talk about that? JH: And that’s a good question. Because it came daily when I always felt the minute I took up the camera that I was exploiting people, especially when they were in really miserable situations. And that’s why I preferred to stay with them for a couple of days before that moment came and then I would be using the flash without actually taking a picture because I couldn’t afford more than one or two pictures each place. I had to sell blood plasma and just the trip from northern Mississippi where you grew up down to the blood plasma banks in New Orleans is a whole day trip. That’s where most of my money came from. I used the camera to give people attention. I know from ghetto kids all over the world that they love to be photographed, but I couldn’t afford to take many pictures of them. So I always faked it. Unlike today, where you have digital cameras, you can just shoot and shoot and shoot. AJ: And then people can see the result immediately. But it’s very interesting what you’re saying, because if you were faking the picture that just shows you that the charge of it was just being seen, because they weren’t even actually seeing the result. JH: Yeah, but not only being seen, - living with them and being with them also meant a lot, I could tell. I felt like a loser myself, I was thrown out of high school. So I have always felt a little guilty about building myself up with people who were also feeling as losers. I was apparently so discreet photographing, or they were so used to me sitting in their homes, that when I came back the first time in 78, and over the years - because I stayed in touch with almost all of my friends - they were so surprised, because they couldn’t even remember that I had taken the photos of them. That I was glad to hear, for that meant that it was our friendship they have valued the most, not my presence as a photographer. I’ve always said that the great art is not to take pictures like I’ve taken, but the art is to get in and stay with people for a long time, that’s what matters.
But I
have felt guilty about benefitting from my white privilege, god damn
it, I’ve heard it so much over the years. When I started presenting
the show you saw I realized that the racism I met was basically my
own racism, so I have changed the whole tone and narration of my
show into saying we.
AJ:
It’s interesting that you talk about the guilt you felt taking
certain photos. There is a story I think of in relation to you quite
often. One of the most incredible experiences I ever had was when I
was in the Howard University. I was in the film department at a
certain point and they had an African film maker, now I can’t
remember his name. I was telling him about the, I wouldn’t say
guilt, but the pressure and the discomfort that I felt when I
pointed cameras at people, but at the same time I felt compelled to
point cameras at people. Like having claustrophobia and not wanting
to go into elevators, but at the same time feeling compelled to get
into the elevator. And he asked me if I knew what a griot is? JH: I don’t even know what to say, because I never understood what I was doing in those years. I just hitchhiked around and it was a daily survival. I felt that higher forces were leading me into the right situations. I’m the last one to describe myself. AJ: I think there’s a metaphysical dimension in American Pictures both in the book and in the slideshow. Not to freak you out, but I will put it in the class of witch doctors. You said you had to sell blood plasma to get the money to take pictures. One of the basic and most fundamental rules of metaphysics, especially from an Africanist perspective, is that nothing happens without blood sacrifice. I’m wondering if metaphysics consciously entered into your practice? JH: Let me give you an example in regards to saying yes and blood plasma. I never forget that day when I was hitchhiking all the way down interstate 55 highway to New Orleans, selling my blood plasma because they paid the most there. And you had to go through what we called the gay wall –the gay center. One time I got picked up by this white gay antique dealer in a pickup truck. And he had asked me if I would go into the woods with him, and I knew of course what he was all about, but I just forced myself always to say yes, so I ended up going with him in the woods. And he did what he had to do. Then he promised to introduce me to this very rich lady, although I never believed him. But he actually drove me to one of these big old plantation homes and I was immediately invited in. It became one of the most important chapters in my book in understanding the old plantation system of the South and I took some of my best pictures there. I have so many stories like this where if I had said no to a person instead of yes, I would not have ended up in heaven – what you call the metaphysical. And once you start seeing that pattern, you have to make yourself go through a little exploitation and hardship to end up in heaven, you never dare to say no to anybody any longer. So the concept of saying yes is the most important part of my whole trip. I could not have made American Pictures without the yes philosophy. AJ: How did you follow up American Pictures?
JH:
That’s a good question. Remember, for 40 years I was standing on a
new American campus in front of a thousand or two thousand people
often, talking about racism day in and day out. Instead of seeing
people as people, I had to think in black and white all the time. In
that sense I felt after 40 years like I was the biggest racist. And
everybody said, you must not think in colors, but I had to do it,
because I was teaching oppression, which in America was between
black people and white people. In my workshops, one issue I was dealing with was getting black people and white people together. I saw the pattern all over that apartheid runs through American campuses. It is very difficult to get blacks and whites together in a healing workshop where you can start really changing. When it happened, I often had strong discussions with black students. When they talked about blackness and black culture and so on, I tried to provoke them a little bit by saying that I did’t see any black culture in America. I asked them: can you distinguish what you call black culture from the culture you got from oppression and ghettoization? AJ: If I were one of the students, I would have answered that the fact that black culture is oppressed is no evidence that there is no culture. You are just talking about the terms in which black culture exists. This is a question that comes up quite often in my circle. One of my really dear friends Fred Moten and I have this one fundamental split in our thinking. He doesn’t feel like black culture and horror are inextricably bound up. He believes that horror and black culture instantly inform and deflect each other, shape and transform how we experience these things, but at the end of the day, black culture is not inherently bound up with horror. Whereas I feel like black culture is inextricably bound up with horror. It doesn’t mean that it’s all there is – if that was all there is it would mean we couldn’t live. There’s also joy and beauty, which are the components of any life. JH: I wonder – and you have to tell me that – because I have not been in America for years and I sense that things are shifting and America changes all the time. But when I was there the people who understood me best were the Africans and the West Indian students who had no problems in universities and usually excelled and immediately melted in on the white side of apartheid. I have the feeling that since then Africans and black Americans have gotten a little more together. AJ: I would say part of what’s happening is because of the way society is structured, not just structural circumstance, but historical circumstance. We are in a dynamic where it is like we live in the emergency room all the time. Most people visit the emergency rooms, but that’s where we live. At a certain point, we are forgetting that. If you are a doctor in an emergency ward, you think everybody is sick. I have had a lot of discussions of the difference between Africans and blacks with one of my assistants Atheel, whom I’m very tight with. Her parents are from Sudan and she grew up there. For me, black is an ontological formation. And it has to do with a number of factors, some of which are the presence of things like anti-black behavior or structure, but also the absence of things. I have thought that African people can’t be black, because they know where they came from. Not in mythic terms, but they literally know where they came from. They know who their great, great, great, great, great grandmother was and so on. And for black Americans, we don’t know that. One of the things that you see happening, and I’ve seen this happen over and over is that the Africans who come here will excel, like you say. They don’t gravitate to the spaces that black people are living or existing in, they gravitate to the spaces of opportunity and light, and fun and positivity. Within two generations, three at the most, that’s no longer the case. These Africans, once they have kids, those kids become black. By the time you get the grandkids, they are definitely black. It’s really a complicated situation, the way in which Africans become black, when they initially weren’t. So you’re right when you say people are coming together, because what has happened is that in the structure that is America, which invariably is anti-black, it doesn’t matter how people see themselves. They get routed into one category or another. Once you get routed into that category it’s not even a matter of who you identify with, it is about who has developed some strategies to survive in that space that you are forced to. JH: I always say that it has nothing to do with blackness. It’s a human condition that we all discriminate against pain and anger. And at the present period in American history, there is a tremendous amount of anger and pain, especially in the black underclass. AJ: Well, you say discriminate but I don’t even know if I would call it discriminate. It’s simply that in a structure in a system that’s too complicated for any individual person to change – you can’t change this by yourself – why would you want your kids to be in the emergency ward? That is just rational. JH: Now are you defending the racists? AJ: I’m not defending them. I’m just saying it’s rational.
JH:
We have to learn to live with other people. And that behavior, that
anger, that pain we have created in our outcasts is absorbed in
mainstream society if we don’t learn to take the risk of overcoming
our guilt and fear for the anger WE created. JH: (laughing). That says it all. I really had hoped that white Americans were changing. But after I left America, Trump came, and all this anger that had been suppressed came out in whites. I am shocked seeing all this racism today. Only a racist would vote for him. AJ: I’m constantly trying to understand what is so seductive, so powerful about these conceptions of whiteness that people will embrace this, even against their own best interest. It is a conundrum. JH: The flip side of this is that I have never, in all my years, seen an integrated movement, as we see now in the Black Lives Matter movement, where whites and blacks are fighting together. And that gives a little hope. AJ: Yeah, absolutely.
JH:
And I want to just tell you that I’m right now working on an updated
version of my book in relation to the Black Lives Matter movement
with some of the bigger, more artistic pictures I took, and it’s
called Roots of Oppression. I try to explain to young people
today where all this anger came from. I have followed up on some of
the people I photographed in the 1970s to see how they are doing,
and sometimes their condition worsened. So this is what I’m working
on right now. That’s why I am glad to have this talk, because it
brings me back into the world after the 12 years I refused to have
anything to do with the racism situation in America. But now the
Black Lives Matter movement has shocked me into thinking that I have
some pictorial and educational stuff that can be used to support
this movement – I’ll show it to you some day.
|
|