American Pictures
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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American Pictures (1977) is a photo book by Jacob Holdt. It had a profound impact on the youth in Scandinavia and Germany, and the Communist bloc saw a chance to use his work against President Carter’s human rights campaign. Holdt was approached by the KGB a few months after his slideshow became a success and he saw a chance with the help of the Soviet Union to penetrate the Marxist bureaucracy in Angola. Here it was his intention to spend the money earned from American Pictures in building a hospital in support of the anti-apartheid struggle.
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 just as bad off 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 Communism.
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.