American Pictures (1985) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

American Pictures (1985) [pdf]

american-pictures.com

90 pointsbrudgers20 comments

This has been for sale as a paper book for decades, it’s very popular. Jacob is also very frequently invited to talk about his pictures and experiences in America and he is still a well known figure in Danish society.

He was our neighbour for 4 years and he’s very friendly, open and very nuanced for an activist of sorts. He often organises events for immigrants and unfortunate people, and invites them to his home. At some point he had a dozen people living there.

If you like the book buy a paper copy or invite him to speak. He’s by no means poor but I’m sure he makes good use of any money he makes.

This may well be worth the read, and certainly received its fair share of hype in the late seventies, but be aware that the author - at least in his native Denmark - has been repeatedly exposed for somewhat inventive interpretations of truth. For example, it has been firmly established that in actual fact he did not - as he claims in American Pictures - participate in or even experience any fighting at Wounded Knee in 1973, where he apparently only arrived when the incident was effectively over.

I only quickly read to page 11, (all pages super interesting) but I don't think it says outright he was there, though strongly implies it. But it says Wounded Knee made it apparent to him he was not a fighter.

Holdt's propensity for fabrication is well known. To the extent that that he was once featured on a Danish site reminiscent of The Onion - about how he accompanied Apollo 11 to the Moon, but arrived late for take-off and had to cling to the ascending Saturn V. On arrival, he found only sad and disenfranchised nazis there.

The social realistic Baron von Munchhausen of our times, then. :)

That’s hilarious, you don’t happen to have a link?

It's in danish:

http://rokokoposten.dk/2015/11/07/jacob-holdt-beskriver-rejs...

Mange tak

This is so shocking! I lived though this era as a young white man in California, poor but totally unaware of the inhumane conditions that the book portrays. My ignorance frightens me. I wonder what atrocities still exist in our world today, and what we can do to bring them to an end.

I grew up in Appalachia we took food to people who lived in shacks. The county next to mine got electricity from the recc in 1979.

I skimmed through and every page I landed on was an interesting slice of life. The pictures feel “authentic”, more so than the typical magazine photos I come across.

Being born in the 1980s I was curious to see what the American Black population's poverty rate was in the 1980s. To my surprise it was as high as 35% [1].

1. https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/visualizations...

50% around 1959... wow

Not really surprising given that was a deliberate policy objective of lots of places in the pre-civil rights era?

Even as late as 1985 the police could carry out what in any other country would be described as a terrorist attack, leaving a number of people dead and burning down 65 houses, without serious consequences to themselves. https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/05/18/407665820...

I feel like folks have a bit of a skewed perspective on the timeline of the civil rights movement because of the way we teach it. For example, Brown v. Board was decided in 1954. We teach it as a culmination of a process (because it’s more dramatic that way). But Brown was just the start, rather than the end, of school desegregation. For the most part, the south simply ignored the result. The famous event where JFK had to send federal troops to forcibly integrate the University of Alabama happened almost a decade later. The first school desegregation cases were brought in Mississippi in the late 1960s. As of 2015, there were still 174 school districts under court-supervised desegregation plans.

This is profoundly good and deeply human writing.

Fascinating. Where did you find this?

On Youtube, I subscribe to The Louisiana Channel (for the Louisiana Museum in Denmark). Arthur Jafa mentions American Pictures in this recent interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iprTrTgXvZ8&t=0s. So I googled it.

This is a classic.

This is so great.

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