Outcast

Photographer Jacob Holdt presents some unresolvable quandaries for ethnographic photography. Since 1970, Holdt has taken tens of thousands of photographs of extremely poor, usually African-American people. His work has been included in only one U.S. group show, at MOCA Chicago in 2005; it is apparently well-known in Europe, and recently, Steidl has published a book of his photographs with an essay by Geoff Dyer. Holdt does not characterize his work as art, instead insisting that its value is sociological and pedagogical. Instead of pursuing museum recognition and commercial publication, he has presented it extensively in lectures and archives it on his website, American Pictures.

Holdt’s work is probably not avoided, however, because it is exploitive or nonaesthetic: a lot of work is exploitive and nonaesthetic. More likely, it’s because his tirelessly simple prose fails to furnish the kind of distance, revolutionary sentiment, self-reflection, or irony that successfully conveys exploitation to market. The artist's statements are an integral part of the work, being attached to it not only through Holdt’s lectures but in texts that accompany almost every photograph and extended narratives that contextualize them. The texts pin the images to reductive “sociological” utterances, call attention to Holdt as naive wanderer from Denmark, or both: “one night after a visit to such a sharecropper, on my 10-mile walk down a dead end road to my shack, I was suddenly ‘ambushed’ by a pickup truck with headlights turned on me and guns sticking out. I managed to talk my way out of this situation, but little by little I realized that such intimidation was deeply rooted in the violent system of peonage.” The problem Holdt presents is that of someone who strives for an ethical intimacy that he does not understand is unavailable, and of what to do with the images that remain regardless.

The photography collective Exposure Project points out the glaring liabilities of Holdt’s position: “Driven by exhilaration and moralistic excitement, he sets out to shoot a couple of thousand pictures of the life and suffering of black America. This constitutes a problem in so many ways right there.” As EP observes, Holdt feeds the concept of the African-American “underclass” that was ascendant during the formative years of the project (roughly 1970-1995). The notion of the “underclass” “served to newly stigmatize poverty. It became a frighteningly effective instrument in the ‘war against the poor’ . . . mak[ing] it possible to justify their not being normal.” Images of exoticized black bodies, however, are not obstacles to commercial success or critical consideration. A provocateur could secure the passage of the same images into art-critical discourse—as actually happened when Lars von Trier ended Dogville with a montage of Holdt’s photographs, and then recast Holdt's narratives of slavelike labor in the contemporary South as Manderlay (the thesis of which reverses Holdt's). As things stand, we have to be embarrassed that Holdt’s naivete can register as more embarrassing than such exploitiveness. The whole issue of exploitation in turn can be a way of deflecting the embarrassment of confronting the existence of the people in the photographs.

Articles note that Holdt’s U.S. work reinforces Danish liberalism, and that U.S. critics’ outrage at von Trier’s use of it in Dogville, in turn, deploy von Trier’s and Holdt’s Danishness to avoid self-reflection. Wim Staat concludes, “a moral judgment about both in what appears to be the same terms cannot but result in the tu quoque reproach” of nationalistic pride (Wim Staat, “Dogville Characterized by The Grapes of Wrath: European Identity Construction through American Genre Conventions,” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 48 [2007], p. 83). Holdt’s own texts assume that he was able to gain access to poor black communities partly because he was Danish and partly because he seemed so guileless. Between the two, he implies, the photographs were able to exist. As his narrative proceeds, the indestructibility of his unsolicited affection becomes more and more an issue. The narrative describes periods of internal change, self-questioning, and even self-shattering. But it does so in an unchanging tone of equanimity, and by means of a repertoire of humanist ideas that remains rigid over time: “My photographic hobby is really, when all is said and done, nothing more than an exploitation of the suffering, which will probably never come to contribute to an alleviation of it. But still I can't stop registering it, because in some way or other it must get out to the outside world. That strength I get by being together with these extreme losers, and the love I often receive from them, is what in spite of everything gives me a slender hope that my pictures will be able to speak even to society's winners.” So, the narrative recovers quickly when Holdt’s affection is declined: the time he is evicted from a bar and escorted out of the neighborhood by armed men; the man who “on the way home . . . suddenly stopped and said, ‘Hey, man, you gotta get out, understand?’"; and the “better-off black couple in Alabama” who

picked me up one day and were going to take me home, but when I showed them my pictures of the sufferings I had seen in the underclass I was let off with the words, "Don't you see anything positive in black people?" I quite simply didn't understand them then and was just as hurt as they since I felt that my photos clearly showed blacks as oppressed rather than incompetent. (“Foreword” to American Pictures)

By his own account, Holdt isn't satisfied with his project, yet his self-doubts can't penetrate to the outside of it; when he assumes that he "was just as hurt as they," he misses again his own main point. Carrying its valuable freight of recorded injustice, American Pictures becomes also an exposure of Holdt's terrible persistence. The chapter called “On Saying Yes” is the core of the simultaneously fixated and exposed quality of the work; its fantasy is that he can heal the abysses created by history by voluntarily giving all. Holdt explains the benefits of assuming “the freedom to throw yourself into the arms of every single person you meet,” detailing his enactment of this "freedom" in sexual encounters with men and women, including his self-exposure to rape. With men, Holdt “usually resign[s] [him]self to whatever happens”; with women, he writes, he realizes that he cannot accept all invitations indiscriminately without doing harm. (His strange underselling of the integrity of the male body, especially the white male body, is also a faith in its omnipotence.) For better and worse, his laconic nonmoral descriptions of violent sexual encounters in desperate environments are groundbreaking. The narrative comes to be taken up with a contest between Holdt’s supply of ego/eros and what he demands from his body. After describing a night of fending off the sexual encroachments of a homeless man in an encampment, Holdt writes:

He was one of those who are outcast among both blacks and whites. I was very sad, because I felt that I had destroyed something inside myself. I felt a deep irritation that I had not been able to give him love. In his eyes, I was a kind of big-shot and it would have made him happy if I had given myself fully. There was just something or other inside me that went "click" that night, so the whole next day I felt a deep loathing of myself. I am constantly finding many shortcomings in my relationships with people, but the worst thing is when my shortcomings hurt such people, who are already hurt and destroyed in every possible way by the society surrounding them. (“Credo”)

We can see here how it is difficult for Holdt ever to deplete the ego/eros that drives American Pictures. Reaffirmation of the project returns in the guise of self-loathing as soon as he questions--temporarily!--one of its terms (the centrality of intimacy), and "shortcomings" always means not going far enough in the same direction. Self-shattering, then, is already reincorporated. As Staat notes, von Trier’s career shows long-term interest in Holdt, whose lectures were a sensation in Denmark. Breaking the Waves and its complement, Dogville, dramatize the sacrifice of women who give themselves to rape in the name of love or social improvement. Set in Scotland and the U.S., transposed to female protagonists, von Trier’s films exhibit Holdt’s innocence/cruelty as two sides of a question about the value of openness to one’s own and others’ suffering that von Trier agrees is the question. But the beings and conditions that Holdt depicts dwarf him. His side of his relations with others is not the only side, and the mindset of the photographer is not their question, nor does it have to be ours. But then, the formalism and saleable criticality of socially minded art photography (Evans, Frank, Parks, Arbus) is not the answer. The photographic legacy from which Holdt disqualifies himself attempts to mediate inequality with technique. As we see in Holdt’s work, the impossibility is instead nearly total, as is the disaster it opens onto.