AMERIKANSKE BILLEDER by Jacob Holdt - 1977 Dutch Edition (True First)

Informations Forlag, 1977, True first edition, 272 pp., 8" X 9 1/2", Softcover

Very good with some surface wear - see photos (still, one of the nicest copies that we have seen of this commonly pretty well beat up publication)

In the 1970s, Danish photographer Jacob Holdt hitchhiked across America, a five-year odyssey recorded in 3,000 pictures, from which he selected the hundreds of images seen in this critically-praised photobook. Upon arriving in the United States from Denmark in the 1970s, Holdt was struck by the stratification between rich and poor: “When you grow up in Europe, America is a land of fantasy, with swimming pools everywhere, Dallas and Dynasty… Europeans come to New York and say ‘wow, this is like entering the third world.’ People are laying all over in the streets, panhandlers, beggars everywhere.”

Shot on a cheap pocket camera, Holdt’s images illustrate the gulf in lifestyle between the elite and the indigent. Rather than using a purely documentary style, he leans toward the expressionistic in these photographs, emphasizing the subjectivity of his and his subjects’ experiences.

Scarce in the Dutch first edition