IT WAS AFTER A PARTY in the middle of a busy San Francisco street
when Jacob Holdt first felt the barrel of a gun in his ribs. He had
arrived in the U.S. less than a week ago, a young Danish hippie on a
vagabond trip. There wasn't much in it for him. He gave the muggers
five dollars he had earned that afternoon donating blood. And yet it
wasn't fear or anger that so shocked him at that moment. "What
shocked me the most was that they mugged me right in front of about
20 black people waiting at a bus stop with no one doing anything,"
he says. "That's when I realized that this kind of thing was
commonplace in the ghetto." He didn't want to escape that night,
either. He wanted to meet the muggers. Just as he always wanted to
get to know the people who insulted, threatened or assaulted him
during his years in America.
"I often got them around because I didn't show fear when someone
came at me with guns or whatever," Holdt says a half-century later
on a sunny morning in his study in Copenhagen. "When they expected
fear and someone suddenly didn't see them as this monster they had
become, but loved them as people, which they were. That's when the
gangsters and crooks often melted away." So he lived for a while
with a murderer in New Orleans, in Baltimore he accompanied a mugger
on his robberies, in New York's black neighborhood of Harlem he
found shelter with junkies. By then he had long since brought his
camera with him. And so, over the next few years, he produced his
book "Pictures from America," which is one of the key works of
anti-racism. He took these pictures in the early seventies. Not as a
reporter, but as someone who had experienced everything he was
documenting.
"Behind hate, there's always fear. And pain," he says. He still has
his beard braided into a pigtail that reaches below his breastbone,
his long hair is white, his face has become narrow. Anyone who talks
to him already understands why all the otherwise invisible people in
America let this Danish hippie sleep and take pictures in their
shacks, houses and apartments. The starving, the junkies, the
plantation workers and the lonely mothers without work, the
prostitutes, muggers and killers, the Black Panthers, but also the
exploiters, the lynchers and the Ku -Klux -Klan. All those who have
no place in the myth of America, because they expose the promises of
this country as lies with their life stories. And who face the world
and people otherwise with distrust, anger and hatred. With Holdt,
there was no distance, no accusations, no doubts.
THREE PHOTO BOOKS have taken away the magic of the USA being the
land of the free and the brave in the 20th century. "Pictures from
America" still packs the biggest punch, because what Jacob Holdt's
pictures lack is hope. For the immigrants from Europe and Asia that
Jacob Riis took into the slums of New York at the end of the 19th
century in poverty and squalor for "How the Other Half Lives," there
was the promise of rising into the middle class with work and
willpower. The natural disaster that turned the American West into a
dust bowl during the Great Depression of the 1930s and turned its
inhabitants into refugees, portrayed by Dorothea Lange in "An
American Exodus," passed. For the people in Jacob Holdt's pictures,
however, there is still no future. They live in a continuation of
the inhumanity that began with their deportation from Africa and
found no end despite the abolition of slavery. Poverty, hunger and
violence are the leitmotifs that run through the book. Although he
took his photographs mainly in those years in which the victories of
the civil rights movement in America created an almost euphoric mood
of departure.
But in the slums, the impoverished countryside, the labor camps and
prisons where Jacob Holdt hung out, this bitter despair continued to
prevail, and was soon to break out again. At the latest with the
marches of the Black Lives Matter movement, it became clear to the
world that little had changed in America. That's why these pictures
still have such a shocking effect today, because they show an extent
of poverty that one would not have suspected even if one were
otherwise aware of the contradictions and injustices in the richest
country in the world.
The journey through these abysses began with a shock for Jacob Holdt
himself. It was pure coincidence that he ended up in the USA. Holdt
was 23 years old and without a plan or a job in Canada, staying on
the farm of acquaintances, when he made the decision to join the
guerrillas in Guatemala. The Mayan country in southern Mexico was
then, along with Vietnam, the model case of what happens when the
U.S. imposes its imperialism with all its might. A CIA-backed coup
d'état, an America-friendly dictator, repression, insurrection, mass
murder.
Jacob Holdt had FOURTY DOLLARS in his pocket. He wanted to hitchhike
there. But he didn't get far. An acquaintance then dropped him off
in San Francisco. It was February 23, 1971. "My first day in the
U.S." He first drifted through the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, the
epicenter of the counterculture. "I walked around there and just
loved the hippies, especially the women in those long Indian
skirts." A young black man immediately offered him a place to stay.
That's how he fared all day. Girls especially were eager to take him
home. "Actually, I would have loved to go with them," he recalls.
"But I had a philosophy that you can't pick people, because then you
always pick the young against the old, the beautiful against the
ugly, or the white against the black or whatever. You always have to
say yes to the first person who invites you home."
And so he went with the young black man, a student from San
Francisco State University. "Late that night, I came to see him. He
said he had to take a test for his math class the next day at the
university, so I could have his bed. I went to sleep. And suddenly,
in the middle of the night, he raped me." It was a brutal experience
that tested his philosophy, according to which behind every hatred,
every outburst of violence, there is always pain, injury, trauma. He
calls this "preemptive forgiveness." Holdt had learned this radical
empathy and this idea of equality in childhood. His father was a
pastor in Fĺborg, a village in southwestern Jutland.
"He was always
preaching about love in church, so I think I was always trying to
prove something to him."
IT WAS NOT EASY. After the rape, he first moved in with one of the
hippie girls. Only to be robbed by this gang a few days later after
the party at the bus stop. That was also only the first of many
times in his years as a vagabond in America that he encountered this
violence. "I was constantly attacked by them with guns, with knives,
or even just insults: 'Fuck off, you white motherfucker.'"
His parents could hardly believe what their son was describing to
them in his letters from America. So they sent him a camera. It was
a Canon Dial 35, not much bigger than a pack of cigarettes, with
automatic exposure and a lever to set three different distances. He
took more than 20,000 pictures with the camera, which still sits
next to the desk in his study, as do the
albums with black cardboard
pages in which he collected his photos.
Nowhere
did he encounter the implacability of this country with such
harshness as in the Southern states. A deceptive beauty
characterizes the fertile soil between Virginia and Texas, where the
rise of the United States as an economic power began. The plantation
fields and estates, the scent of magnolias, the Virginia oaks with
their veils of Spanish moss, and the magnificent towns with their
wooden buildings are the stuff of countless songs and novels
romanticizing an old world. A world that ended in the history books
with the abolition of slavery after the American Civil War more than
a century and a half ago. But that was just in the books. What Jacob
Holdt discovered in the workers' huts in North Carolina and Alabama
was the continuation of historical atrocities that had begun with
the displacement of African peoples across the Atlantic.
In America, native blacks had never been free since slavery," Holdt
says. "They had internalized that. They were constantly told they
were inferior. They told their own children that there was no hope
for them." On the plantations for cotton, tobacco and oranges, they
lived in oblong wooden shacks called shotgun houses, which were so
shabby that even Americans who lived in the same counterparts would
not believe that people lived like this in their country.
Electricity and water were rare. Light came from kerosene lamps at
night. Cooking was done on cast iron wood stoves. Holdt was one of
the few whites who ever entered these houses, and he could always
stay there for weeks at a time.
LOOKING at these pictures today, it is still hard to believe that
this misery not only existed in the U.S., but that more than a
hundred years after the end of slavery, it was one of the
foundations of the prosperity of the richest nation in the world.
Large corporations like Coca-Cola and the tobacco companies continue
to profit from this misery quite directly today when they hire
subcontractors who they don't spend a lot of time asking how they
treat their workforce, whether they are located in China, Bangladesh
or Alabama. "My photos can't show what I felt back then," Holdt
says. He was never just an observer there, either. He lived in those
shacks, made friends, moved in with families became the on-again,
off-again lover of one of the workers. During the day, he helped in
the fields, where they harvested crops for little money. "The
pictures just don't show the cracks in the ground through which the
wind passes and the snakes crawl into the house. You don't smell
that harsh smell that's all over the houses there." Even the image
of the girl standing in front of the old icebox, looking into the
empty shelves, can only make you imagine the desperation that hunger
brings. Real hunger that often drove people there in the south to
eat the heavy clay to fill their stomachs.
In the "Black Belt" in Alabama, that Jacob Holdt had to learn that
his well-intentioned visits could have cruel consequences. He stayed
with Mary for a while. The young woman had lived from picking cotton
and harvesting sugar cane since childhood. Her brother and son lived
with her, "way out on a lonely Alabama road in a shack with no water
or toilet, but at least electricity, a television that was often on,
and an old refrigerator that looked good against the cardboard wall
of the shack," he later wrote. And, "They were happy and restful
days I spent there with her and her son John." But word soon spread
in the area that there was a white man staying with a black woman.
When he made a short trip, three whites threw a firebomb into her
kitchen. Mary and John managed to escape. Their brother perished in
the flames.
In the book, this story takes up only a page and a half. And yet
Holdt's friendship and love for Mary remained until she died in
2014. He had visited her, cared for her and paid her medical bills
as she became increasingly ill with cancer.
WHEN JACOB HOLDT returned to Denmark after five years of vagabond
life, he began work on his book. In 1977, "American Pictures"
appeared, first in Denmark, then in the rest of the world. The
success was tremendous. Only in the U.S. did the book not appear. He
soon realized that he could not tell his story with a book alone in
such a way that it would change something in people. "I saw myself
as a bridge builder between whites and blacks in a world that was
completely divided." A slide show and lecture ended up being the
form in which he felt he could make the most difference. It lasts
five hours, a succession of images in which America's contrasts
collide over and over again. The homes of junkies and the dinner
parties of high society, the wooden shacks of plantation workers and
the mansions of landowners, the harshness in the faces of whites and
blacks, Native Americans and those in power. He plays music to
accompany it, especially the track
"Ship Ahoy" by the O'Jays, a soul
anthem in which the band sings about the deportation of Africans
across the sea. It's quite an effort to sit through the five hours.
But he doesn't cut it any shorter. "If I just give an hour lecture
there at the universities, the students have forgotten it the next
day," he says "But if you sit down with people for four or five
hours and show them these images until they're really shaken up
enough to sign up for the racism workshop, then you've reached
them." And not just students. Martin Luther King's daughter,
Yolanda, performed with Holdt. James Baldwin, the legendary pioneer
of African American literature, once traveled through a blizzard,
seriously ill, to see and hear Holdt speak. Barack and Michelle
Obama's Harvard Black Law Students Ass. invited him to Harvard
University again and again. His lecture may have changed, but Jacob
Holdt's message has remained.
NOW, IN THE YEAR 2022, he is no longer quite so world famous. Some
people in Copenhagen still recognize him on the street, and in New
York someone sometimes calls out to him "Ship Ahoy," the musical
leitmotif of his picture lectures. But he has not yet found a
publisher for his new book. "Roots of Oppression" it is to be called
and will tell the whole story of his life and his paintings. "I
think at the moment many are afraid of a white person telling the
story of black people," he says.
But perhaps it has to do with the fact that Jacob Holdt has expanded
the concept of oppression to include a group that, whether in the
United States or the rest of the world, has few sympathizers. That
is the men and women of the Ku Klux Klan. When he then goes on to
say, "I didn't find them nearly as racist as all the students in
America," the headwind is powerful. Yet Holdt has been concerned
with this part of the U.S. from the beginning. When he left Mary for
the short trip during which her home was set on fire, he was headed
to a Ku Klux Klan meeting in Kentucky. What he found there was the
fault line in a society that has never overcome its divisions.
Today, perhaps even less than ever.
As for why he thinks most students are more racist than Ku Klux Klan
members, Jacob Holdt explains, "Whites usually move away when there
are too many blacks at the school in their neighborhood. The only
whites who can't afford it are the poor whites. Most of the Klan
members come from schools that were 95 percent black. They were too
poor to move away, so they had all these black school friends. That's why
the typical Klansman has a lot more close black friends than most
whites."
A FEW YEARS AGO, Holdt once drove across the country with one of
these Klansmen and introduced him to his black friends. Jeff Berry
was his name, "Imperial Wizard" of the American Knights of the Ku
Klux Klan in Indiana.
There is a Danish TV movie of this trip. There
they also visit Mary in her new home in Alabama. When Jacob sits
down with her and tells her who he has brought with him, she looks
at him in horror and fear. But then they do sit down on her porch
and talk. And Berry talks to more and more of those people he
usually insults in this film. Until he gets to the point outside a
café in New Orleans in a conversation with Jacob Holdt's black
friend Ernest. That the very blacks and whites who live in poverty
share a fate that they could fight much better together. They don't
say it, but what they're addressing is this quintessentially
American problem of racial conflict overshadowing class conflict.
"My journey has taught me that I can no longer hate any person, any group,
or any class anymore,"
Jacob Holdt says in a video he produced for
social media two years ago at the height of protests against police
violence. "Most of us are so wrapped up in our pain that it's easier
to hate certain groups than to try to understand them, because
that's how we avoid fighting the part in our system that we find in
ourselves."
ONE HALF YEAR after the trip with Holdt, by the way,
Jeff Berry left the Ku Klux Klan. The latter's son and some buddies
brutally beat him up soon after during a barbecue. Even when his
father was down, young Berry continued to kick him. Why they went
after him has never been legally determined. Suspicions persist that
Jeff Berry's departure from the Klan was considered treasonous. In a
world founded on hate, Jacob Holdt's attitude of absolute neighborly love
and forgiveness is
a radical presumption. And it can have radical consequences.
GEO author ANDRIAN KREYE knows the scenes depicted in Jacob Holdt's
photos from his own experience: He lived for years as a
correspondent in New York and has described the dark side of the
American dream in reportages.
Photo texts
THE
DREAM AND ITS DARK SIDE FIREWORKS
Since the beginning of the 20th century, the Ku Klux Klan has been
celebrating its ritual of hatred. The burning crosses can be seen
for miles around as a beacon and a threat. For Jacob Holdt, however,
the Klansmen were also sufferers of history, much like their black
victims Gadsden, Alabama, 1978
INHERITANCE OF GUILT
Holdt
lived at times with the descendants of slaveholders, as here with
Mrs. Barnett, who had just received a visit from a friend. He saw
their racism not as hatred but as paternalistic love for their
once-dependent Washington, Georgia, 1975 90
HUNGER
For
Jacob Holdt, children in front of half-empty refrigerators became a
symbol of the misery of the poor. He looked for this motif again and
again because he knew it would immediately strike a nerve in Europe
Pireway, North Carolina, 1975
JUSTICE
In 1972,
the U.S. Supreme Court declared the death penalty unconstitutional
because it disproportionately affected blacks and the poor. Sections
of the middle class disagreed and called for its reinstatement, as
seen here at a petition drive.
New York City, New York, 1974
PARTYLAUNE
Transsexuals have always been a minority among minorities and lived
with the ostracism of many classes. Good humor like at this party in
the Tenderloin ghetto was often resistance to discrimination
San Francisco, California, 1974
ALL THE WAY UP
For a
short time, Jacob Holdt hired himself out as a chauffeur for the
left-liberal millionaire "Wild Bill" Gandall. This gave him an
insight into a world that remains as closed to most Americans as the
ghettos of the poor
Palm Beach, Florida, 1974
ALL THE WAY DOWN
Jacob
Holdt met the two while waiting for friends in a bar. He had
realized early on that wealth and skin color were not necessarily
linked Jacksonville, Florida, 1974
THE CLOUVE
Even
when he was no longer a vagabond, Jacob Holdt kept traveling to the
United States. After the end of Ronald Reagan's presidency, he
observed how the gap between rich and poor grew deeper and deeper.
New York
City, New York, 1996
SHOTGUN
SHACKS
In the
Southern states, Jacob Holdt discovered the world of migrant and
wage laborers. In their camps with their shotgun shacks, the time of
slavery seemed to have never ended
Meridian, Mississippi, 1975
THE
BEAUTY AND THE BEAST
For a
time, Baggie and Jacob were a couple. He loved the woman and
recorded her with her son during a program about the Senate hearings
on Richard Nixon's Watergate scandal. She later went to prison for
bank robbery
Greensboro, North Carolina, 1974
SPIRAL OF VIOLENCE
One
night, Jacob Holdt witnessed a migrant worker next to him in a bar
get stabbed. For the sheriff, the case was just everyday
Immokalee, Florida, 1974
IN THE SHADOW OF POWER
Every
now and then, Holdt achieved images whose symbolic power had a
lasting impact on viewers in Europe. For him, the junkies looking at
the Capitol in Washington were an exemplary sign of how close power,
wealth and misery are to each other in America Washington, D.C.,
1973
FORBIDDEN LOVE
Nothing
marks the brutality of a society as clearly as the persecution of
love. Blacks and whites were allowed to be in relationships by law,
but not by society's rules. Homosexual love, however, was not legal
in every state until 2003
San Francisco, Calif. 1982
EMERGENCY
This
87-year-old woman from a poor settlement in Alabama always carried a
revolver out of fear. Even when Jacob Holdt drove her 2,000 miles to
Arizona, where she wanted to die. The long-haired hippie scared her
Notasulga, Alabama, 1975
BEAUTY
IDEALS
Cynthia
was a prostitute who helped Jacob Holdt find a place to stay. On one
of her walks, she showed him what she thought of common images of
women
Las
Vegas, Nevada, 1975