Photographer Jacob Holdt: A Message of Love

March 12, 2025 5:05 AM

A Message of Love is a long interview with Danish photographer/activist Jakob Holdt. Long haired hippy Jakob Holdt hitchhiked in the US for 5 years in the early 70's, documenting the lives of the most marginalized people, as well as some of the most affluent. His "adventures" resulted in an output of 15,000 harrowing photographs, which he later published as the book "American Pictures". (CW: Abuse, Racism, Deprivation, Poverty, KKK).

You can also watch the original slide show that Holdt created on his free website.

Previously, from 2003.

This is a piggy-back for Lemkin's FPP about Jim Goldberg's "Rich and Poor". (I left a comment there about it, but I believe it deserves a separate post.)

posted by growabrain (5 comments total)

thanks growabrain, this does work well with Lemkin's post

appreciate both posts
posted by ginger.beef at 8:11 AM on March 12

This type of photography always makes me cringe a little...no.matter if it shows poor, rich, or middle class folk. Seems invasive somehow
posted by Czjewel at 9:50 AM on March 12

I had this book in the 1980s and found it very eye-opening. I think my sister may have seen his presentation. The work strikes me as the opposite of invasive. He writes with a lot of empathy about the people he befriended and photographed. It's a very personal work. One detail I remember is him talking about his braided beard, how that was a signifier that helped people trust him.

Interesting detail I just learned from Wikipedia

However, when his book was 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 violated just as egregiously 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 the Soviet Union.

posted by Nelson at 10:03 AM on March 12 [2 favorites]

Faint memory-- did he feel bad about turning down sex he didn't want? I might have him confused with someone else.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 1:23 AM on March 13

I remember seeing this book in the 80s as well. It was a definite contributor to my social consciousness and felt hardly different from Dorothea Lange’s photos of America in the Depression.
posted by acridrabbit at 2:44 AM on March 13