Jacob Holdt

At the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize exhibition at The Photographers' Gallery in London, Holdt presented his photographs of the "filthy rich" and poverty in America in a slideshow—each image projected onto a plain white wall in a darkened room, immersing the audience in the dark and dreary world of poverty and maximizing its impact. In 2009/10 his pictures were exhibited in the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art.

The film Precious (2009) premiered in Denmark in February 2010. Holdt was invited to introduce the event. In an interview reported in the Danish newspaper Politiken, he spoke of the time he spent with Sapphire in the 1980s in Harlem. They inspired each other and shared an interest in issues of oppression having both explored it from street level.

Holdt was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2008 and received the Fogtdal Photographers Award in 2009.

Along with his continuing lectures Holdt has since 1991 worked as a volunteer for CARE (Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere) in several third world countries. He has continued to document the lives of those in poverty while working for CARE.

As a result of losing most of his expected income from the book, Holdt could not finance a hospital, but only a nursing school built for the Namibian resistance group SWAPO in Kwanzu Zul in Angola with matching funds from the European Union. After the liberation of Zimbabwe in 1982 he also supported projects there. At the end of the cold war he was briefly accused of having been a KGB-agent, but it was easy for his publisher, Dagbladet Information, to show that he had actually worked for the other side and had even flown President Carter’s human rights envoy over to approve his film manuscript intended for the American market.

However, when his book was published in 1977 the KGB revealed to him that it was their intention to use it in an all-out campaign against Carter to try to demonstrate that human rights were violated just as egregiously in America as in Russia. Only a month after its publication, Holdt therefore hired his lawyer, Søren B. Henriksen, 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.

His work captured the daily struggle of the American underclass and contrasts it with images of the life of America's elite. Upon returning to Denmark in 1976, Holdt began lecturing on social differences in the United States and published a book: American Pictures. He later presented his slideshow at over 300 college campuses across the United States and Canada.

In the spring of 1970, Holdt traveled to Canada to work on a farm. He planned to travel to South America to support the government of Salvador Allende after Allende was elected president of Chile in September 1970. Holdt never made it. In the United States, he was robbed. He stayed in the United States and spent four years working in civil rights issues

Jacob Holdt (born 29 April 1947) is a Danish photographer, writer and lecturer. His mammoth work, American Pictures, gained international fame in 1977 for its effective photographic revelations about the hardships of America's lower classes.

Born in 1947 in Copenhagen, Holdt was the son of the pastor at Grundtvig's Church in Copenhagen. In 1950, the family moved to Fåborg, a village where he spent most of his childhood. After being thrown out of high school in 1965, Holdt attended Krogerup Folk High School, north of Copenhagen. Expelled from the Royal Palace Guard after eight months, Holdt spent several years protesting the Vietnam War and conditions in the Third World.