From the catalogue of Museum of Modern Arts Louisiana:
"Faith, hope and love" by Jacob Holdt


Text on Jacob Holdt:



Holdt's activity as a photographer

 

In 1971, Holdt’s parents sent him a camera as a birthday present: a Canon Dial. The unusual feature of this 35-millimeter camera is that it takes pictures in a half-frame format (18x24 mm negatives). Holdt has never received any form of instruction. All the technical know-how related to photography that he has acquired is self-taught.

I was always working with 160 ASA film and didn’t have an extra camera with high-speed film. So I needed some light and I typically put the flash behind a lamp and sometimes wrapped it in a piece of pink toilet paper to make it look like the light from an oil lamp in a home without electricity. I was always going around to stores asking for pink toilet paper, to get that reddish glow. It was the only way I could make those shots. Shooting with the flash alone flattens everything out, and the mood of the moment before the picture wouldn’t come out at all. I was always trying to recreate that in different ways. After all, it was completely dark in a lot of these homes and I wouldn’t have been able to get a picture without using a flash – I wouldn’t have got any pictures at all.

During the period 1972-75 Holdt spent a lot of time taking pictures: He shot approximately 15,000 photographs. Since that time, he has taken a great many pictures in America and in the rest of the world. During the years he spent as a ‘vagabond’ in the United States, Holdt sold his own blood twice every week in order to generate the money to pay for film and for developing his pictures.

I discriminated in my pictures. I think I more or less subconsciously chose the more attractive members of a family and chose to take pictures of them. I’m not crazy about group shots with 10 or 20 people at once. So, I sit there waiting – when is a single person alone with his or her thoughts? Simply because I knew that white racism discriminates against certain aspects of black culture, I always had to speak to the deeper humanity in whites – in that sense, I had to be racist myself.

Holdt has always been very concerned about getting to know the people whose pictures he is taking. Typically, he lives for some days with the people before he starts taking pictures of them.

As a rule, I had to stay with people two or three days before reality crept in, before they were suitably relaxed around the photographer to allow me to interpret what I saw and see the deeper, underlying reality. Then you may ask, is this the true, deeper reality? And yes, it is. Things whites didn’t see, don’t see. They see it as something else. So it was important for me to sit and wait for those moments that, so to speak, showed the reality before the strange photographer intruded. And that takes time.

From the beginning of the 1990s, Holdt started to work as a photographer for the humanitarian organization, CARE. As part of these efforts, he meets members of minority groups and oppressed or persecuted people in a number of countries all over the world: for example, in Kosovo, where he portrays the Albanians’ homecoming to charred houses destroyed by fire and relatives whose corpses lay in mass graves.

I’ve always said I wasn’t a good photographer but a good vagabond, good at getting into homes no one else could get into, but where anyone could have taken a good picture.

Holdt continues to take photographs wherever he is. Recently, in the spring of 2009, he traveled around the United States in order to visit old friends. While moving around, he also met people he had not met before, whose lots in life he managed to capture with the camera’s lens. The result of these efforts now constitute

Holdt still photographs where he is. Most recently, in spring 2009, he travelled around the US to visit old friends. He also met new people whose fate he captured, and who now make up the latest update to Holdt's American image bank.
Holdt's political engagement
Holdt relates early to the reality he lives in. He is thrown out of the Royal. Livgarde for refusing to shoot. At 20, he paints over the church where his father is pastor, protesting the spending of money on a church tower while millions starve in Biafra. In the late 1960s, Holdt becomes politically involved in both the Third World and the Vietnam War. A commitment that leads him to Canada and then to the United States. Holdt participated in the Vietnam demonstrations in the US and spent 5 years documenting the lives of the poorest blacks in America. Returning to Denmark, he creates his slideshow lecture, which he is subsequently asked to publish in book form; American Pictures. The book and the slideshow make a clear statement about the inequality between blacks and whites in America at that time. Awareness of racial differences informs Holdt's work. Among other things, he refuses to let a publisher publish his book in the United States because they do not have black employees. Instead, he creates a network of street people, homeless people and ghetto criminals who sell the book for him. But Holdt's commitment also extends to many other parts of society where inequality exists.
"I've been around black Americans so much and worked on the problems associated with black America that you could say I've ended up writing my own biography - in interviews, for example - in relation to just that. But then recently came the film Milk about the American gay politician Harvey Milk. In connection with it, there was a debate in Jyllands Posten that made me sit down and write about my involvement with the gay movement. And suddenly I could see and define myself in a completely different way ... I have lots of pictures that are about completely different people in the United States than just the poor blacks."
Holdt's work collective sets up the Fund for Humanitarian Aid to Africa to provide indirect support for the ANC's anti-apartheid struggle through Danida. Later, Holdt becomes involved in other Africa projects: buying farm machinery for Batsiranai, building a school for returning refugee children in Nyafaru, Zimbabwe, and funding a hospital in SWAPO's Kwanzu Zul guerrilla camp in Angola. Holdt also smuggles secret documents for the ANC from Harare to a resistance group in Botswana.
In the early 1980s, the collective in Købmagergade is converted for a few years into a residence for 40-60 Arab refugees. Holdt begins holding racism workshops at hundreds of American universities in the late 1980s as a follow-up to his slideshow lectures. This work developed into a series of lectures and workshops during the 1990s, both in Denmark and internationally. The Danish NGO IBIS, whose projects in Angola Holdt helps fund during apartheid, invites him to document conditions in Namibia and South Africa after apartheid. In South Africa Holdt participates in the UN Conference on Racism in 2001.
"And I find it interesting that people often refer to me as a leftist. You might say that my approach to people is left-wing, but I've never voted for any left-wing party. I've always been in the middle, where I could be in dialogue between right and left. Or bring that dialogue forward." Holdt also works intensively with the Ku Klux Klan. Among other things, he takes America's worst Ku Klux Klan leader around to visit his black friends in an attempt to influence the leader to leave the Klan. From 2002 Holdt became more actively involved in the debate on integration in Denmark and was elected to the board of Critical Muslims and Mixeurope. Today he is known as a public debater who gets involved and often makes his views known through more or less polemical contributions to the daily press.
Holdt's role as mediator
Holdt's role as a mediator is central to his work. In 1975 he began writing and photographing for De Sorte Panteres magazine and Kristeligt Dagblad, among others. In 1976, he gives his first slide show of his American pictures in the church where his father is a pastor. He soon receives invitations to show American Pictures all over the country, and is given the Huset Theatre in Copenhagen for two months. Later, Dagbladet Information publishes American Pictures as a book, and it becomes an instant bestseller. The slide show is also a success, and is shown in Denmark to 2000 people a day. In 1977 Holdt opens his own theatre in Købmagergade in Copenhagen, where Amerikanske Billeder runs for 10 years. The German newspaper Der Spiegel runs the book as a series in 1978, and the book becomes a bestseller in Germany. A film version of the slideshow is also made and presented in 1981 at the Cannes Film Festival and later at the London, Berlin, Dublin, Los Angeles and San Francisco Film Festivals. The following year, Holdt and local volunteers open a permanent theatre for the slide show in San Francisco. In 1983, Holdt publishes an American edition of his book. Several American publishers want to publish the book, but since none have any black employees, Holdt decides to publish it himself in order to let his black friends in the book sell it. From 1984 Holdt begins to tour US universities regularly and soon becomes one of the most widely used lecturers in US university history. At many of the elite universities, it is mandatory for new students to see his slides before starting university. "As a Dane, someone who comes from one of the world's most equal societies, I was not so much photographing what looked like my own society, but what was completely different - the filthy rich and the filthy poor, which I had never seen before. It was shocking to me. And I soon discovered how it was also visually effective in getting a message across." In the late '90s, and after more than 6,500 slideshows, Holdt began to scale back tours of the United States to visit and photograph his friends in the ghettos more. At the same time, Holdt begins to show the slide show again in Denmark. From 2002 Holdt gets involved with the Ku Klux Klan in the USA. He conducts a series of interviews with Klan members about how many of them were mistreated in childhood, with the aim of making an interactive DVD production for teachers around the world about racism and oppression. A project for which Holdt is still trying to raise funds. Meanwhile, a film has been produced about Holdt and his involvement with the Ku Klux Klan. Jacob Holdt still gives plenty of lectures to school students, organisations and political forums. Not only American Pictures, which has been continuously renewed, but also a wide range of other lectures and workshops on racism and oppression. These and similar educational projects can be found on his website www.american-pictures.com



Mette Marcus (b. 1971) is curator of the exhibition Faith, Hope & Love - Jacob Holdt's America. Marcus holds degrees in art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, and the University of Copenhagen, and has been Curator at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art since 2003.