Jacob Holdt

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jacob Holdt (born 1947 in Copenhagen, Denmark) is a Danish photographer and author. Arriving in America in the 1970's, he spent several years hitchhiking across the country. He stayed in over 400 homes, most of them belonging to impovershed minorities, and took thousands of photographs. His photos seek to demonstrate the daily struggle of the American underclass and capture the emotions they experience. He will often juxtapose a poor or homeless person with symbols of "white oppression" or "white power."

The photographs were published in a book, American Pictures ISBN 87-981702-0-1, and are also available on Holdt's website. He also prepared a slideshow, which he has shown at over 300 college campuses across the United States.[1] [2]

Since 1991, Holdt has worked as a volunteer for CARE in several third-world countries. He has continued to document the lives of those in poverty while working for CARE. His most recent projects have also focused on white supremacist hate groups. Holdt spent time living with leaders of the Ku Klux Klan and photographing their daily lives.

Since American Pictures had a profound impact on the youth in Scandinavia and Germany, the Communist block saw a chance to use his work against President Carter’s human rights campaign. Jacob Holdt was approached by the KGB already a few months after his slideshow became a success and saw a chance with the help of the Soviet Union to penetrate the Marxist bureaucracy in Angola. Here it was his dream at first to spend the money from American Pictures by building a hospital in support of the anti-apartheid struggle.

However, when his book became published in 1977 the KGB revealed to him that it was their intention to use it in an all out campaign against Carter to try to demonstrate that human rights were just as bad off in America as in Russia. Only a month after its publication Holdt therefore hired his lawyer, Søren B. Henriksen, to stop his own book all over the world. Except for Germany, Holland and Scandinavia, where they already had contracts with his Danish publisher, he managed to stop it and did not release it again until the end of Communism.

As a result of loosing most of his expected income from the book, Holdt could not afford a hospital, but only a nursing school built for the Namibian resistance group SWAPO in Kwanzu Zul in Angola with matching funds from the EU. After the liberation of Zimbabwe in 1982 he also supported projects there. At the end of the cold war he was briefly accused of having been a KGB-agent, but it was easy for his publisher, Information, to show that he had actually worked for the other side and had even flown President Carter’s human rights envoy over to approve his film manuscript intended for the American market.