HOLDT, Jacob

About the Danish photographer, Jacob HOLDT (b. 1947, in Copenhagen)

Jacob HOLDT is a photographer, writer and lecturer. In the spring of 1970, he arrived the U.S. with only $40; shocked and the same way fascinated by the social differences he encountered, e stayed more than five years, criss-crossing the country by hitchhiking more than 100,000 miles and taking thousands of photographs with a cheap pocket camera. His work captured the daily struggle of the American underclass and contrasts it with images of the life of America's elite. His mammoth work, 'American Pictures', gained international fame in 1977 for its effective photographic revelations about the hardships of America's lower classes. Only a month after its publication, he hired a lawyer 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. Jacob HOLDT was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2008, received the Fogtdal Photographers Award in 2009 and Lifelong artist's grant from the Danish Arts Foundation.

Photo books by and on the work of Jacob HOLDT

'American Pictures' (1977); 'United States 1970–1975' (2007); 'Indians and Campesinos in Bolivia' (1991); 'Nepals Jord' (1996); 'Tro, håb og kærlighed – Jacob Holdts Amerika' (2009/2010)