Important book, but sadly very poor photo quality.
Danish Jacob travelled through America from 1970 to 1975 and stayed with almost 400 families depicting the poverty in that country ( )

AMERICAN PICTURES chronicles Danish vagabond Jacob Holdt who journeyed through America's poverty and hypocrisy. The title of the book references the most striking part of the book, hundreds and hundreds of photographs chronicling the hundreds of lives he was invited into as he crisscrossed early to mid 1970's America. Despite his not having an experienced eye, many of the photos are quite beautiful in their execution but the power comes from the content. Images of ghetto street life that catch moments in between other moments where quick decisions are called for to either just move the day along or end a life. Other pictures are more like life portraits where the subject is condensed in a moment captured amidst the rubble of a distraught life. The photos take up about half of this slightly over-sized book, the other half is text cobbled together from letters he wrote during his travels and episodic narrative pieces mixed with political polemics written years afterward. The scenes range from a crime in action to people holding each other while simply trying to make a life to other people so soul crushed by obliterating poverty that they have decided to just lay in the street and wait for death. The pictures pierce the skin, the narrative opens a wound that is not allowed to close for the entire book and even after.

I am approximately twice as old as I was when I first read this book. I was curious if I would feel about it now the way my much younger eyes and heart did back them. The book was quite an eye-opener for this pasty faced child of a southern Californian Suburb. While I still consider the book something everyone should read--it will leave virtually anyone angry and heartbroken--it doesn't scan for me quite the same as it did when I read it in the 80's. I was about the same age when I read this originally as the author was during his travels. My amazement at what he was willing to do at that age, willing to see and experience things that scared me to even read about allowed him license to go un-criticized for his short comings. His process of vagabonding required he always say yes so as not to offend or alienate (including partaking in a lot of sexual activity--often not activity he would have chosen) and also not to intervene in developing situations for the same reason. These strategies allowed him access to people and places that he might never have seen otherwise. Even now I accept that--but not to the same degree I did 25 years ago.

While he freely admits many of his shortcomings, including that ultimately he is a privileged white guy profiting from the abject misery of others. there are portions of the book that actually hurt me in ways he did not intend. He created this escape for himself--there were several situations in the book where his inaction contributed to devastating events and his narration plays out the events such that he says something like, "only much later did I realize what was happening." Possible but his street smarts seem to desert him when convenient. As densely packed as his experience was, his "ability" to remain inactive in certain situations is upsetting and boggling--two in particular. While at a poor family funeral following a sudden death, his decision to remain detached while his "friend" grew crazed with grief contributed to her emotional collapse that night and possibly for all her remaining nights. And while working with "one of his best friends" jail house rights activist Popeye Jackson whose life was known to be under constant threat, the author gets a phone call warning him not to get in a car with Popeye that night. Does he attempt to warn Popeye that something might be up. Never occurs to him, until later, and Popeye and a passenger are executed in that car that night. The author only comments how close he came to being in that car. Then there is an event of action and inaction. Despite all he's seen, and this is years into his travels, he decides to get married and settle within the hellish ghetto trap without any resources or plans whatsoever. He marries a black woman which only puts a bigger target on both of their backs. And his inability to cope with the situation (trying to survive on blood donation money) he should have known not to choose leads to misery and grief, demolishes their relationship and almost removes his wife from the list of those who still want to survive.

These are all things, human responsibilities, that I feel much stronger nearing fifty than I did at 23. Despite how valid I feel his analysis of ghetto life simply being a grinding continuance of the slavery structure in America and how that extends to the extermination of blacks through poverty, starvation, limited education, drug scape-goating, prisons as the new ghetto, my anger and frustration has grown because of the author. Granted he was young but he had to be a lot older after years of that intensity. Also, it is nice that he has funneled much of the profits from his books and speaking tours into charitable endeavors--he speaks at the end of the book about projects he is working on in Africa. If he cops to his white self profiting from the misery of others--shouldn't he have sought a way to give more directly back to those he exploited. You can probably guess that I finished this book about five minutes ago. My cranky old man tirade aside, this book is definitely worth your time. ( )

Fascinating visual tour of family homes in different socio-economic groups, contrasting extreme affluence/poverty disparity in the US. ( )

Amazing, true story. "True" in a special sense. Goes with Tolstoy's "What Shall We Do?" Both of them explored questions of poverty and human dignity.

This is not just a picture book. The pictures, in a way, simply vouch for Holdt's determination to get inside the lives of others, to gain their trust, to hear their stories. He tries to tell all sides. He tells of his own feelings when exposed to exploiters and bigot-minded individuals. ( )

http://bintphotobooks.googlepages.com/dutchstandardsinthephotobookahistoryparr ( )