American Pictures: A Personal Journey Through the American Underclass

Jacob Holdt
American Pictures: A Personal Journey Through the American Underclass

Photographs: Jacob Holdt

Publisher: American Pictures Foundation

304 pages

Year: 1985

Comments: Hardcover under illustrated dust jacket, 24,5 x 20,2 cm, color photographs. Text in English. In good condition. Edge wear on the hard cover, the dust jacket is in ripped close to the spine and used. Text in English.

In this illustrated odyssey of 800 photos, the bulk in color, Jacob Holdt describes his experiences at the Wounded Knee uprising, with drug addicts in "shooting galleries", and in projects with welfare mothers.

He also depicts the friendships he developed with transvestites and transsexuals; the violence and murders he witnessed; his own arrest by the FBI; and his startling encounters with the opposite extreme of American society, including Jay Rockefeller and Ted Kennedy.

The book is a forceful reminder that the poverty and inhuman living conditions which were so brilliantly exposed a hundred years before by Holdt's fellow Dane, Jacob A. Riis, in his classic study, "How the Other Half Lives," continue to exist.