One Image by Nina Strand:

There is a book in my library, American Pictures by Jacob Holdt, that has followed me through every move I’ve made. Holdt became famous when he hiked around the USA in the 1970s with a small camera in his pocket. He spent the night where he could, documenting racism and inequality between black and white people. These photos became the slideshow American Pictures, published as a book in 1977. Holdt has inspired many who work with sociology within photography today, and is often compared to another Dane with the same first name, Jacob Riis, who a hundred years earlier, in 1890, documented the ghetto in New York in the book How the Other Half Lives. Holdt told me in an interview that he discovered the book by Riis in a store in San Francisco and stole it to look at it on the road. He also claimed that while Riis held the world’s first analogue slideshow, he himself would be the one to give the last.

Interviewed on the occasion of the exhibition Faith, Hope and Love, Jacob Holdt’s America in 2009 at Louisiana Museum, still sporting his long, braided beard, and with no plans to retire, he spoke about his extensive travels with his slideshow to schools, trying to educate young adults about the hardships suffered by Black Americans. It took the museum 35 years to exhibit his work, but Holdt had always refused to show his pictures in museums, seeing them not as art but as a fulcrum for workshops on racism, and saying that is was only by accident that he photographed at all. It was his parents who gave him a camera in order to see more from his travels. He had never held one before, and taught himself all the technical aspects. He claims that although he wasn’t a good photographer, he was an excellent vagabond. There’s nothing wrong with the images though; he knows what he’s doing when he frames them, as with the three black kids standing beneath a billboard commercial where two white children are juxtaposed with the text ‘Independent Life’, or the three black women in a beauty pageant smilingly giving the Black Power salute.

I went with Holdt to the small Danish town Ringe, where the lucky recipients at a local high school sat mesmerised for several hours in front of his images of poor black people, very rich white people and poor white members of the Ku Klux Klan. As he told me in the car on our way, he just wants to understand racism, to see the bigger picture of where this hate comes from, and he wants to smother the racists with love and make the hate disappear. Maybe his thinking is propelled by the Scandinavian saying that trolls disappear when they’re exposed to sunlight.

This text is from Perpetual Photographs, Objektiv #21. Find the latest book from Holdt here.