made the day-to-day poverty of an affluent society – plenty of TVs; a huge fridge, filthy, and crammed with nothing that looks safe to eat – look more impoverished. So much so that his photographs of people and their homes look like they were made not in the 1970s but seventy years ago, as if they were a recently exhumed part of the stash of colour pictures taken under the auspices of the FSA – minus the bright, uplifting imperatives encouraged by the organisation’s director, Roy Stryker. Like many petitioning photographs, Holdt’s depend on an initial reluctance to accept what they show, to reject what they seek to prove: surely people could not be living like that in the 1970s, in America. By then, by the 1970s, Evans’ pictures had acquired a texture and glow that brought about a retrospective improvement to the lives he had recorded. Roughly the same amount of time has already passed since Holdt made many of his best-known pictures and it seems unlikely that they will ever undergo a similar kind of upgrade. It looks like it might be quite nice to sit on the stoop of one of Evans’ shacks and suck down a cold one with Floyd Burroughs, but you’d never want to sit on one of the sofas in Holdt’s places, let alone sleep in one of the beds. But that’s being too solemn and snooty. Put it this way: if Holdt was showing us these images as holiday snaps (which, in a sense, they are) we’d have to say, ‘Man, you stayed in some shitholes!’
There is a qualitative technical difference too between Holdt and Evans. Made by a man assured of his vocation, Evans’ work aimed at deep permanence. His prints are luminously beautiful. Shot with cheap film, Holdt’s photographs were notes made in passing, ‘a kind of diary’ or visual journal of a man who abjured all sense of vocation and purpose other than hitching a ride or finding a place to sleep. There’s minimal disjuncture between what he was photographing and the means with which he recorded it.
As with homes and furnishing, so with people. FSA-style photography, especially in the magisterial images by Dorothea Lange, meant that even when stripped of everything else the Okies retained their dignity. So much so that the Depression became a form of visual attrition, stripping people down to their essential dignity. There are occasional traces of this in Holdt’s work. The woman that he finds in Florida – haven’t we seen that deeply lined, dried-out, life-ravaged face before? We have, of course; it is the stoically defiant face of the Great Depression, but whereas Lange’s ‘Migrant Mother’ cradled her children, this woman nurses a cigarette over cans of Budweiser in a bar; and it’s not her helpless children, it’s a husband or boyfriend who is sidling drunkenly up to her. His neck might be red but the face of the guy Holdt meets in a bar in Mississippi has the battered charisma of a Johnny Cash song – and his shirt’s nice too. Around the younger women photographed by Holdt there sometimes lingers the possibility, not just of a place to stay but the dangerous allure of cross-racial romance.
The deprivation witnessed by Holdt often robbed people of everything, including their dignity – with the coming of junk food, poverty tended to bloat, physically, rather than erode – but this is balanced by the way his pictures lack the single-minded pride that Evans, Lange and others took in their medium and in their own status within the pantheon of its greatest practitioners. The disconnect between what is recorded and the way in which it is recorded is at its starkest and most blatant in Richard Avedon’s photograph ‘William Casby, Born a Slave, 1963’. It’s a great picture, an unflinching depiction not just of a man’s face but of the very thing that obsessed Holdt: the psychological and historical residue of slavery, of internalised powerlessness. Unlike Casby, the picture of him is absolutely confident of its power, of its self-evident right to rub shoulders with works by any of the masters of portraiture from the entire history of art. While Avedon called the shots, as it were, Holdt addressed his subjects – like ‘Charles Smith, a former slave’ – more modestly, on their own terms and in their own homes. As vagabond and photographer he depends upon and graciously accepts people’s hospitality. That’s the advantage of the vagabond-artist method: black, white, rich, poor, racists, junkies, hookers, pimps, Klansmen, gun nuts, rednecks – they all extend their kindness and trust to Holdt and, as a result, are seen at their best, at their most American.
Unobtrusively, almost incidentally impressive, Holdt’s photographs have – as we have seen – ended up in a museum in spite of their maker’s declared intentions. It was only recently, after a quarter-century wait, that they took their place alongside the work of his contemporaries and successors. As soon as they did, certain resemblances were so striking, the feeling of kinship so strong, that it was as if a prodigal had finally agreed to show up for a long-postponed get-together. The young, sticker-and badge-festooned Republican photographed by Holdt at a convention in Florida way back in 1972 is reunited with the boy in the straw hat and the Bomb Hanoi badge (as seen by Diane Arbus) on a pro-war parade in 1967. The 87-year-old woman Holdt drove all the way from Alabama to Arizona, the one brandishing the gun in the doorway of her shack, meets up with the old guy sitting on a bed with his gun (photographed by William Eggleston) in Morton, Mississippi. Actually, once you make adjustments for some variation in palette, there is evidence of a whole generation of interbreeding between Holdt and Eggleston, especially if we bear in mind the latter’s declared intention to photograph ‘democratically’.
‘Eggleston’ has become a kind of shorthand or metonym for colour photography generally and, in Holdt, there are glimpses of the kind of stuff that fascinated another renegade colourist, Stephen Shore, in American Surfaces. What Luc Sante said of Nan Goldin – that she was able to ‘take the most squalid corner of the worst dump and find colours and textures in it no one else saw’ – almost holds true for Holdt. Whereas Goldin finds ‘oceanic’ blues and ‘crepuscular’ oranges, Holdt sees the same, unexceptional colours as the rest of us but – like Helen Levitt in her colour work – coaxes an understated harmony from the muted maroons, pale greens and (in one of his best pictures, of a girl on a bed, watching telly) dullish purples, grey mauves. What he shares with Goldin is an absolute lack of distance or inhibition between photographer and subjects. In Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (which, like Holdt’s American pictures, enjoyed its first incarnation as a slide show) we get an hermetic account of a community with a fairly fixed cast of characters within a city at a particular historical moment. The same is true of the grey rush of Larry Clark’s Tulsa (1971). With Goldin it’s transgressives, bohemians and druggies on the Lower East Side; with Clark it’s teenage speed freaks shooting up in Oklahoma. Holdt’s project is inherently less circumscribed. His readiness to go along with whatever happens and to get along with whoever he happens to run into makes for a sprawling odyssey of serial intimacies and random proximity. Along the way he occasionally gets to watch a bit of TV (there are a lot of them about) or to watch people watching it (or, on one occasion, to watch them stealing it). In the image of Baggie feeding her baby while Nixon is beamed into the room, the political irony is implied silently. In others there is the sense, observed by Lee Friedlander (in photographs) and later verbally corroborated by Jean Baudrillard, that a television might be broadcasting from ‘another planet’ or showing ‘a video of another world’. In this world, meanwhile, Holdt accidentally witnesses the scenes of violent death sought out by Enrique Metinides, another photographer only recently promoted to gallery status.
That Holdt’s pictures did not go knocking on the doors of museums, as it were, did not plead for institutional recognition or art-critical approval is a prime reason why they deserve admission. As more and more people use cameras as a way of gaining acclaim not as photographers but as artists, so the status of this surrogate medium is in danger of becoming somewhat overblown. Literally. The question one asks repeatedly in gallery shows of 6 x 10 prints (feet, I mean, not inches!) is: Does this work earn its size? Would this photograph be able to make the grade as a work of art if it had not been pumped up with the growth hormones of the artist’s huge aspirations and ambitions? The paradox is that some of the most artistically valuable contemporary photographs are content with being photographs, are not under the same compulsion to pass themselves off – or pimp themselves out – as art. The simple truth is that the best exponents of the art of contemporary photography continue to produce work that fits broadly within the tradition of what Evans termed ‘documentary style’.
Obviously it was not intended in this way, but
