to Paul Graham and the grandly sublime ambitions expressed by the images of a black guy mowing a lawn in Pittsburgh (2004) from the series A Shimmer of Possibility. Unexceptional – and admirably so – Holdt’s picture is a persuasive demonstration of how photography might keep itself trim or cut itself down to size.
Holdt’s movement from the photographic fringes to the walls of a museum – and the corresponding shift of emphasis in any assessment of his career, from activist to photographer – is not just deserved, it is historically inevitable. Records of moments in time, these photographs have outlived their time in a way that the words surrounding them in the book American Pictures have not. Perhaps this conforms to a more general truth about the relative longevity of words and images when paired together in this way, for the same thing happened to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) by Evans and James Agee. Gore Vidal wittily scorned the ‘good-hearted, soft-headed admirers of the Saint James (Agee) version of poverty in America’ which, over time, has come to seem at odds with the enduring value of Evans’ ‘austere’ photography. Holdt’s engaging naivety saves him from the kind of Scandinavian omniscience that becomes wearisome in Sven Lindqvist’s later polemical writing, but the text of American Pictures would not be reprintable today except as a historical document or exhibit, like one of those mammals found preserved in a glacier. The enduring vitality of the photographs, on the other hand, is evident in two, apparently contradictory, ways.
First, they wouldn’t look out of place in Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land (1965), a first-hand testament to the problems of addiction, poverty and deprivation that pre-dates Holdt’s arrival in America. Second, they could readily be inserted into more recent accounts of the drug-ravaged American ghetto, such as Richard Price’s novel Clockers (1992) or David Simon and Ed Burns’ masterpiece of ‘stand-around-and-watch’ reportage, The Corner (1997). Holdt photographed Ronald Reagan in 1972, ‘long before he became president’; Simon and Burns quote him years later, saying that ‘we fought a war against poverty and poverty won’, a line that could serve as a caption for any number of pictures in this exhibition. The so-called war on drugs, the authors insistently remind us, actually became a war against the poor. Holdt, in this sense, was a combat photographer, embedded in the front line. His experience renders him more, not less, sympathetic to those caught up – or actively engaged – in the conflict, visually affirming Simon and Burns’ claim that ‘if faith and spirituality and mysticism are the hallmarks of any great church, then addiction is close to qualifying as a religion for the American underclass’.
The issue, as always, is one of precision and detail, which the pictures provide in deliberate and accidental abundance. (Strangely, the hairstyles and clothes date the pictures in the sense of identifying them with a period – Holdt was working at the same time as Garry Winogrand, obviously – without confining their relevance to that time.) There is a good deal of rhetoric in Holdt’s writing, almost none in the pictures. This is partly because some of the pictures are not about anything; certain moments or events – students on spring break jumping, scarily, from their balcony into the hotel pool – just happened to catch his eye. And partly it is because some are about so much more than what they are ostensibly about.
For a photographer whose interest is primarily documentary or polemical, Holdt’s work is surprisingly rich, psychologically. The people in his pictures are never just representatives of the fallen condition in which they find themselves. The stories implied by the photographs are often more subtly individualised than the ones set out by the text of American Pictures. As with Eggleston – again – a tacit narrative seems poised to unfold within each frame. Some are tense with expectation, like Jeff Wall tableaux, almost, frozen in the act of time. But even off-the cuff ones condense an unexpected amount of time into the split-second of the photograph’s creation.
Take the picture of the woman in the green halter-neck dress, eating a lobster and smoking a cigarette at a lavish dinner in Palm Beach (see plate 1). The photograph is neither caustic nor judgemental – how could it be when the man seated between the woman in green and the fellow in the related green blazer is wearing one of the funnest jackets ever seen? – but its overt message or social meaning has to do with the gluttony or vulgarity of someone eating and smoking at the same time (weirdly, the one thing she does not seem to be doing is breathing). The fact that these two activities – eating and smoking – normally occur successively rather than simultaneously suggests that the exposure has taken twenty minutes (i.e. the time it would take to tuck into the lobster and then smoke a cigarette) while the guy swigging momentarily from his champagne shows the real speed of time. Perhaps that’s why there is a sense that she has slid out of the shared time of the table and into some kind of private trance (technically a result of Holdt’s flash?) as if she might actually be one of the undead, the unbreathing, or an alien in human form, some kind of Stepford Wife who found that those two lines of coke before dinner had really put the kibosh on her appetite. When Deckard subjects Rachel to the Voight-Kampff test in Blade Runner it takes far longer than usual to establish that she is actually a replicant – because she is under the illusion that she is a human being. Holdt here photographs, or suggests, someone during a moment when she gets an inkling that all the things that make her life humanly meaningful might actually be illusory, false. Or maybe we’re being too solemn again: could be she’s really feeling that coke, so intent on appearing to listen to whatever the (unseen) guy across the table is blahing on about that she’s not heard a goddamn word, even though it seems like he’s been talking at her since the dawn of time and no punchline is yet in evidence. Either way, the condensation of time in the image means that this moment lasts for both a hundredth of a second (shutter and flash, sip of champagne), twenty minutes (eating and smoking) and, extrapolating from there, a lifetime.
2009
The tradition of photographing exotic places reaches back almost to the invention of the medium. As the Grand Tour was extended to take in ‘the Orient’ so, in the 1850s, photographers such as Francis Frith lugged their bulky equipment to the eastern Mediterranean and beyond. Once the resulting pictures of the pyramids and other wonders became widely available the desire to go to these places increased. Such was – such is – the allure and promise of photographs that people wanted to see the precise spots shown in the pictures. Part of the motive for travelling was, as it were, to experience the photographs on site, for real. Of course there was a lot to see that hadn’t been photographed, but the places in the frame served as oases or taverns, nodes that visibly determined one’s itinerary. Adventurous travellers naturally wanted to get off this pre-beaten track. By so doing, the places they visited gradually became part of the track. Just as Wordsworth complained about the growing numbers of visitors to the Lake District that his poetry had attracted so travellers to out-of-the-way places began to lament the tourists that came after them.
As travelling has become quicker, easier and cheaper so this problem – or syndrome – has grown more acute. Whereas it once required a considerable effort of will and some ingenuity to get to Egypt, Paul Fussell, in his book Abroad, thinks that the coming of efficient, uniform jet travel – which ‘began in earnest around 1957’ – ‘represents an interesting moment in the history of human passivity’. Maybe so but, as Garry Winogrand’s airport photographs from the 1960s and ’70s attest, it also heralded a great democratic expansion of the opportunity horizon.
The pictures in Martin Parr’s Small World both sum up this contradictory history and depict what might turn out to be its terminal phase. They show the places photographed by the likes of Frith (the pyramids) and they show how the excitement and promise of Winogrand’s pictures has become a source of cramped frustration. When I was seven, in 1965, my parents and I went to London for a week’s holiday. One day, as part of this vacation, we took the Tube out to Heathrow, not to fly somewhere, just to see the airport. For us it was not a place of departure but a tourist
