Working the Room. Geoff Dyer
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 Holdt’s photograph of the bearded black guy mowing a lawn in shorts and t-shirt in Saratoga can usefully be seen as a modestly prophetic corrective 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