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Images of Compassion: The Work of Jacob Holdt
His photographs of poverty, oppression, and struggle in the US are just as urgent now as they were then.
As Jacob Holdt tells it, he arrived in the US simply to pass through. He was mugged by three black men, however, and remained in the nation in large part to try to understand where so much pain and violence could come from. In the years to follow he would take around 100,000 photos with a cheap camera, all the while criss-crossing the US as a hitchhiker with so little money he often had to sell plasma to get his photos developed.
His photographs show the US as he witnessed it from the poorest corners to the wealthiest estates. He was not a journalist, but a participant — he was often hungry, often without shelter, and was mugged and raped multiple times throughout his journey.
He didn’t shoot from a safe distance. He could never have seen such candid shots of domestic love and life for those in lows places if they’d seen and known him as someone just looking to gawk. He saw with love, and so they opened up to him, and through his pictures we can see some little part of humanity that is, in the US, so often oppressed and destroyed.
Look through his photos. See the life there — precious, and so terribly vulnerable.
