在路上
这回在哥本哈根现代艺术馆还看了一个印象非常深刻的摄影展：“Jacob Holdt眼中的美国”。
在现场每一张每一张观看这些真实反映美国70年代社会现状的照片，我的感觉除了震撼还是震撼。这是wiki上对Jacob Holdt的介绍，他的人生经历可谓惊心动魄，一切的缘起是1970年代他装着40块美元就踏上美国大地的旅行。大家自己看吧，我就不转译了：
Jacob Holdt (born 1947 in Copenhagen, Denmark) is a Danish photographer, writer and lecturer.
Passing through the United States in the 1970s with $40 in his pocket, Jacob Holdt was shocked and fascinated by the social differences he encountered. He ended up staying in the USA more than five years, criss-crossing the country by hitchhiking more than 150,000 miles and recording his impressions on film.
He sold blood plasma twice a week to buy film. He stayed in more than 400 homes – from the poorest migrant workers to America’s wealthiest families (for instance, the Rockefellers) – recording these encounters over 3000 photographs taken with a cheap camera. His work captures the daily struggle of the American underclass and contrasts it with images of the life of America’s elite. Upon returning to Denmark in 1977, Holdt began lecturing on social differences in the United States and published a book: American Pictures ISBN 87-981702-0-1, which is available on Holdt’s website. He later presented his slideshow at over 300 college campuses across the United States.[2] [3]
American Pictures 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.
Since 1991, Holdt has worked as a volunteer for CARE in several third-world countries. He has continued to document the lives of those in poverty while working for CARE.
His most recent projects have also focused on white supremacist hate groups. Holdt spent time living with leaders of the Ku Klux Klan and photographing their daily lives. Holdt is sympathetic with the people he encountered in these groups, pointing out that most grew up under marginal circumstances and often were victims of child abuse. Holdt emphasizes the similarities in background between white supremacists and poor minorities.
Holdt’s ability to capture representations of the “filthy rich” and poverty in America resulted in him being nominated as one of the four shortlisted photographers for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2008. At the exhibition at The Photographer’s Gallery in London Holdt presented his photographs for the prize in an effective and mesmerizing slideshow – each image beamed onto a plain white wall in a darkened room, immersing the audience in the dark and dreary world of poverty and maximizing the impact.
Holdt lost out on the prize to the photographer Esko Männikkö from Finland.
From 02.10.2009 until 07.02.2010 Holdt’s pictures were exhibited in Louisiana Museum of Modern Art.
前一阵子，写麦田里的守望者的塞林格去世了。这本小说我只粗粗翻过，没认真看过，但其中的精神内核我想我是能够体会的。虽然我的个性决定了自己会走一条遵守社会规则，承担世俗责任的道路，但对于这些常人口中的离经叛道者，我特别理解和支持（但不羡慕）。也许只有在丹麦这样民主自由风气盛行的国度，才有可能产生出很多象Jacob这样用自己的整个人生去行走的人。他把自己的生活交织到了他的旅行和他的观察中，和所有拍摄对象都是零距离接触。因此那些简陋的照片才会如此震撼。他用自己活生生的血肉之躯去碰撞过了，用自己全部的时间去度过过了。这种投入生命的方式是那些所谓的世俗成功没有办法比拟的。
其实人活在这个世界上，最幸福的就是做自己, 找到自己的热情所在。这样子的话，无论你选择去行走或者安居，选择面对外部世界或转向内省，你的内心都将是充盈丰满而坚定快乐的。