Jacob Holdt: My Life in Pictures

“Jacob Holdt: My Life in Pictures” is the story about the son of a village priest, destined to be a priest himself. But Jacob rebels against his father and the expelled son becomes an outcast in Gods own country, USA. In the 70’s the Danish vagabond tours America with only one rule of thumb: never say no – to anything or anyone, a radical philosophy with radical consequences. Where everyone else walks out, Jacob walks in. He befriends sinners and outcasts: the needy dirty old men, the murderers, the Ku Klux Klan, the prostitutes, the pimps, the drug addicts and even the rich. His wanderings on the dark side of American Society leads him to the black communities – from the ghettoes in the North to the cotton fields in the South.
With this odyssey he gains wisdom and comes to understand how the American racism forces black youth into criminal gangs and transforms neighborhoods into ghettoes – where the laws of repression can eat souls from within.
Jacob’s pictures and all his hard learned lessons of life in downtown USA, becomes the book and the roadshow “American Pictures” that still to travels the world. Today the vagabond is an acclaimed photo artist exhibiting his pictures from the vagabond years in museums of modern art all over the world. And, even more importantly, he uses his acquired wisdom to fight racism in Denmark. Now, at the age of 67, Jacob feels an urge to understand his life and write the final book about it. During his research he revisits defining people from the long journey of life.
Why did Jacob learn to say yes, where we say no?