When I was 18, some friends of mine from high school and I rented an apartment in Prague and lived there for a part of a summer. I remember seeing a book that summer, I’m not sure if someone owned it or it had been left in the apartment by a previous tenant, but it was photographs by a young Scandinavian man taken during the 1970’s while he hitchhiked throughout America, sleeping on couches and spending his days and nights with whoever would let him tag along. The impression it left on me is immense. I have been looking for that book ever since, and to no avail. This morning I was reading a eulogy for the artist Dash Snow, who died of a heroin overdose several days ago, written by the photographer Ryan McGinley in which he references their shared obsession with American Pictures by Jacob Holdt. Indeed, this is the book. I was able to pick up a used copy of the book for $10 from Amazon. There are several other titles from Jacob Holdt available, but I can’t tell whether they are additional photographs or merely selections from the 800 or so that appear in American Pictures. Thankfully, Holdt has made over 15,000 images from this period available on his website. According to his website, Holdt arrived in Canada in 1970 at age 24 with the aim of travelling through America to his true destination, South America. He ended up spending the next five years traversing over 10,0000 miles of America’s highways, ghettoes, and backwoods, mostly through hitchhiking. After writing to his parents about the conditions he found in American cities, his skeptical father mailed him a $30 camera to create documentary proof of his claims. From that point on, Holdt generally sold two pints of plasma per week to buy film, and slept wherever lodging was offered. Thank you Ryan McGinley. RIP Dash Snow. And most of all, thank you Jacob Holdt.

When I was 18, some friends of mine from high school and I rented an apartment in Prague and lived there for a part of a summer.

I remember seeing a book that summer, I’m not sure if someone owned it or it had been left in the apartment by a previous tenant, but it was photographs by a young Scandinavian man taken during the 1970’s while he hitchhiked throughout America, sleeping on couches and spending his days and nights with whoever would let him tag along.

The impression it left on me is immense. I have been looking for that book ever since, and to no avail.

This morning I was reading a eulogy for the artist Dash Snow, who died of a heroin overdose several days ago, written by the photographer Ryan McGinley in which he references their shared obsession with American Pictures by Jacob Holdt. Indeed, this is the book.

I was able to pick up a used copy of the book for $10 from Amazon. There are several other titles from Jacob Holdt available, but I can’t tell whether they are additional photographs or merely selections from the 800 or so that appear in American Pictures.

Thankfully, Holdt has made over 15,000 images from this period available on his website. According to his website, Holdt arrived in Canada in 1970 at age 24 with the aim of travelling through America to his true destination, South America. He ended up spending the next five years traversing over 10,0000 miles of America’s highways, ghettoes, and backwoods, mostly through hitchhiking. After writing to his parents about the conditions he found in American cities, his skeptical father mailed him a $30 camera to create documentary proof of his claims. From that point on, Holdt generally sold two pints of plasma per week to buy film, and slept wherever lodging was offered.

Thank you Ryan McGinley. RIP Dash Snow.

And most of all, thank you Jacob Holdt.

Notes

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