Prague - When someone takes 15,000 pictures and refuses to be called a photographer, it may be either out of modesty or out of a feeling he used photography only to convey a powerful message to the world.
Both explanations are true in Jacob Holdt´s case. The Danish-born photographer and a political activist came to Prague this week to open an exhibition of his photographs in the Langhans Gallery.
The displayed pictures were taken by him in the mid-1970s when traveling across the United States.
"Photography can be powerful and I use it as a means to show people their racism and prejudice. But I am not a photographer," adds the tall and bony Dane of Don Quixote looks, with long unruly hair and a braided beard.
His pictures are as colorful as his life - who can ever boast he stayed in slums and luxurious Hollywood villas, met gangsters and famous film directors, lunched with KGB spies, drank tea with a wife of a multimillionaire, got drunk with the Rockefellers and had his name put in KGB files under the label of a double agent?
Once Upon a Time...
It all starts like a fairy tale: a young boy in his early twenties leaves home to experience a real life out there. While traversing across America, he encounters appalling poverty that he describes in letters to his parents. They refuse to believe his words and send him a camera to document what he sees for them.
A short trip to the U.S. turns out to be a 5-year odyssey that teaches young Jacob a lesson about abject poverty, pain and loneliness and reveals two faces of America. He sees the country through the eyes of someone who grew up in a "European welfare state", as he calls his country of origin.
That empowers Holdt to recognize social injustice and poverty that the Americans themselves have become immune to and let become institutionalized. There is nothing striking at first sight when you see his photograph of an old black woman hardly standing on her feet and meticulously sweeping her meager shack, but a closer scrutiny of the picture hits you like a ton of bricks.
The power and visual aspect of Holdt´s color photographs was something that inspired famous Danish director Lars von Trier when writing a script for his two films - Dogville and Manderlay.
The former uses the real pictures at the end of the film while David Bowie sings "I am afraid of Americans". Even twenty years later the pictures come across as shocking.
Young and Daring
Free of prejudice, Jacob Holdt takes his little camera to places no photographer dares to go. Enjoying a complete trust of his companions, who are largely black, he offers an authentic and raw image of the American underclass.
He lives with the most shipwrecked souls in slums and ghettos, witnessing drastic every day scenes from drug abuse to going hungry. One of the most impressive photographs displayed at the exhibition shows a small girl searching for food in a rusty refrigerator, which is full of garbage but no food to placate her hungry stomach.
Penniless and homeless, constantly on the road with not much more than a few bucks in his pocket, his skyward-pointing thumb and insatiable desire to meet people, it was not only the social outcasts living on the verge of the society that Holdt found feeling alienated and lost.
While roaming across the continent he meets also middle and upper class people who are equally lonesome and desperate, if not more. He ends up staying with them too.
That explains why Holdt believes a vagabond has a social mission. "People do not invite you home because they want to treat you nicely and be hospitable but because they want to be entertained or to talk to someone or just to be with someone."
Being homeless did not mean having to sleep outside, though. Holdt maintains vagabonding is much easier in the United States, as Americans know how to develop instant and disposable relationships, not being burdened by class awareness as Europeans are. In all these five years he hardly spent a penny - everybody willingly fed him, even the poorest, if they could.
Little Jacob against the Soviet Invaders
Jacob´s social awareness which he developed in his teenage years is something that has hurt him repeatedly in his life. As he tirelessly defended the oppressed, he was called a Marxist a number of times in the West.
Paradoxically, he was unwanted in countries where Marxism-Leninism was bread and butter. His open protests against the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 (he was 12 years old) and of Czechoslovakia in 1968 made him somewhat unpopular in former Eastern Bloc countries.
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Practical tips
- Cinema Světozor will screen both films by Lars von Trier inspired by Holdt´s photographs Dogville and Manderlay - on Nov 27 (Dogville at 18,30 and Manderlay at 20,45)
- Buy the newly re-published controversial book American Pictures (800 CZK) to try to understand for yourself why KGB wanted to use the book as propaganda against the then American President Jimmy Carter. It was nominated for Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2008 in London.
- The exhibition will last until January 20, 2008
- Visit Jacob Holdt´s webpage - it is fun to read and you will find out more about how the American Pictures came to exist.
Our fairytale continues: while Jacob comes back home with 15,000 pictures and 12 friends murdered, disillusioned about the despair of America´s poor, his father organizes a slideshow to prove to everyone in the village that what young Jacob was about in the States had nothing to do with prostitution, homosexuality, drug abuse and so on.
It is a great success, media discover Jacob and soon a book called American Pictures is published.
Staying true (and poor)
The publisher wants to make it a global success, when KGB approaches Holdt offering him cooperation. They would like to use the photographs as their anti-American propaganda.
Holdt does not want to tarnish the then President Carter´s human rights policy and therefore rejects the book to be republished worldwide. He gets into a long legal battle with the publisher, which results in many years of the book being an out-of-reach matter.
"I could have been shamelessly rich by now but instead I stayed poor," Jacob recounts with humor.
Years later the book finally arrives to former Czechoslovakia. Its republication, free of all the original text, is to be credited to the exhibition curator and re-discoverer of Jacob Holdt Paul Cottin: "When we called Jacob three years ago to offer him a renewed exhibition and re-publication of the book, he refused, saying he was not a photographer."
Well, let the viewer decide. Just go and see for yourself.
