Faith, Hope and Love

“I’ve always said that I’m not a good photographer, but a good vagabond.
Good at getting into homes where
no one else could come, but where anyone
could take a good picture.”

For the past 40 years Danish photographer and storyteller Jacob Holdt has documented that the glitz and glamour of the American dream are only part of the picture.

The exhibition Faith, Hope and Love - Jacob Holdt’s America presented Holdt’s insistent, heart-rending photographs from the 1970s until today, including photographs from his most recent American journey in 2009. Here was a chance to encounter a pictorial narrative of a USA through the past four decades to which few people have been so close.

Jacob Holdt  has the gift of capturing images that are not easily forgotten or discarded: The girl showing a letter, she has written to her deceased mother. The couple sharing a kiss through prison bars. A family sitting together on a sofa showing off their weapons. Members of the Ku Klux klan sharing a Sunday meal...

Many of the more than 200 pictures presented in Faith, Hope and Love - Jacob Holdt’s America had not been shown before, and the exhibition demonstrated how Jacob Holdt’s sensitive photographs are far more wide-ranging than pure documentarism. 

"The whole thing about going out and photographing some suffering people and then exhibiting their suffering - anybody can do that, but to me it's like cheating... It is clearly overstepping my boundaries to photograph someone before I have struck up a kind of friendship with him/her."

Faith, Hope and Love - Jacob Holdt’s America was divided up thematically - couples, religion, police, highways etc. Here we could see city dwellers in tough ghettos, junkies on the street, poor people sunk into apathetic loneliness, miserable rich people, sick people with no money for medical aid, white, black and hungry people. But we were also met with love, hope and faith in the future. In short, pictures of the social reality of the people who inhabit America. A lesser known side of Holdt’s pictorial world was also presented, namely photos of landscapes and buildings.

Holdt as a storyteller: The personal connection between the story in the picture and the photographer was reinforced by a mobile phone-based presentation in the exhibition. Each viewer could use his or her mobile phone to hear Holdt himself tell the story behind a number of the pictures exhibited.