Zoom talk with Arthur Jafa about Foreword to my updated book "American Pictures"


Jacob Holdt

00:05:39

Well, from you saw (the slideshow American Pictures in 1984) and until today there has been a shift. So why would historical pictures like mine have a value in in today's America? Or maybe they don't.

Arthur Jafa

00:06:07

Well, one thing I will say about Americans in general, and I am not saying that's a unique insight. I think a lot of people realize this. I even think people who are in denial about it realize it, is that fundamentally America has at least 2 original sins. One is, of course, originally this sort of eradication, or genocide, that was enacted on the native peoples of this continent, the native Americans. That's the original thing.

When Europeans came to the Americas is that they came here with the incredibly antagonistic posture and relationship to the people. They did so much evil towards the native population. And to a certain degree, if you look at America, if you look at American movies and stuff like the whole genre of Westerns is just like propaganda. It's like, if the Nazis won World War 2, and they had a whole genre, you know, vindicating and trying to explain and make excuses for how they dealt with Jewish people. That's what the whole genre of Westerns are, the entire genre of Western movies is about trying to retail the narrative of white people, Europeans, coming to the America, right? So that's the original fundamental saying. And we know the next original saying is, slavery.

Okay, America is never going to reach anything remotely like its potential. Even its equilibrium. Forget potential. It's not going to ever really be a society with equilibrium until there is a fundamental - what they call in South Africa - truth and reconciliation. We've never had a truth in reconciliation in America. We've run from it. It's a fundamental aspect of American society to run from these fundamental truths.
You know people are brought up to say, “Why does that have anything to do with me? That's something that happened 200 years ago. I wasn't there. I didn't do it personally,” you know what I mean. But by and large Americans - and when I say Americans, I'm saying white Americans, now have a really difficult time understanding the kind of historical burden, like they have a hard time coming to terms with all their privileges, all they have managed, all the things that they take for granted, have premises on having genocided native Americans, and for a hundred plus years, utterly exploited African Americans. You know what I mean.

So, they don't want to come around, they want to be guilty about it like why I should be guilty, I didn't do any of these things. But they don't understand how fundamental their benefits in society are based in premise on these 2 fundamental spheres. And yeah, it's kind of unfortunate that a person is born into a situation where they're born into the role of the bad guys like Darth Vader, or something like that. You know, they're born as bad guys. Even when they're not bad people on the individual level. It's structural. Yes, it's structural.

So one of the things that your work does, I think on a fundamental level. And I'm talking about American pictures now, it makes it impossible to sustain the delusion. A lot of the delusions, the delusionary structures. They tremble in the face of American pictures. You could almost use that if you need one quote, ha, ha, you know. American delusional structures tremble in the face. They tremble, tremble, shiver in the face of American pictures because it's showing you the fundamental reality that everything in society teaches us to be in denial about.

I was talking to a friend the other day, I don't know how we got on, he just said, Oh, national health care! And a person here who's never traveled and never been anywhere else would say, Oh, that's communist! But they're using language from the twenties and thirties. When blacks, when Americans hadn't been anywhere else in the world, hadn't traveled anywhere else in the world. If we travel at all. You realize all these different kinds of societies, you know, the Scandinavia and all these places like England. Everybody has national health care. We don't have national health care here. Fundamental – yes, it should be fundamental - civic rights are not available to Americans. Here you have a whole population of people who will actively work against their own best interests. They would rather not have national health care because they have been given a fantasy that it's mostly black people who would benefit from it.
I never forget saying this interview where this guy was interviewing two white people. They were like, you know, Trump people, whatever. And they were anti Obama. And this is like what they said. What do you think of this Obamacare? And this was like we hate everything about Obama we hate what came out of it. And then they were asked, well, what are you gonna do when you don't have health insurance? And they said, oh, we're not worried about that because we got the Affordable Care Act. Which is just another name for Obama care, ha, ha.

I was like laughing, and it's not that I am mean, I don't want to insult people, for a lot of it is just fundamental ignorance. But it's kind of deeper than just ignorance because ignorance is a lack of knowing something. But the American population is large and the product of people actively miseducating people about the nature of the world. I mean, as soon as you travel, and you start to see how other people live for better, for worse, it puts how you live in perspective. You know, it gives you relativity, right? There’re some things that are really great about American society. The diversity of American society is one of the true benefits of it. We have energy because energy comes from friction, it comes from diversity. So, we're a very energetic society. But we're a society where the powers that be create these structures, these ideas that make poor white people - under class white people - think they have more in common with rich white people than they do with the majority of black people who are also working class and under class.

Martin Luther King didn't get killed when he was talking about black civil rights and things like that. He got killed the moment he said, oh, this is a poor people’s march, not a black people's march. That's when he was assassinated.

And it's always the case, over and over and over. We see it when people broaden their perspective, even when you have black revolutionaries, when they start to broaden their perspective and say, oh, I get it! Black people have suffered. Black people continue to suffer. Structurally we are disadvantaged. But when people start to be able to see that it's a larger picture, that we are part of a larger structure, that is built to basically disadvantage people, that's when people get really dangerous. You know what I mean when they start shooting people like Fred Hampton in Chicago. “So, we need to organize black people in relationship to people from the Appalachians” and things like that. Just to even say things like that, that's when people become dangerous.

Jacob Holdt

00:14:03

Yeah. This book is sort of a mixture of political activist book and art photography book which makes it difficult for publishers to place. Is there a chance that it can succeed this kind of mixture?

Arthur Jafa

00:14:27

I mean, look, Bob Marley and the Wailers is an example is a combination of political activism, or at least ideological activism, and pop music. Ain't nobody saying that Bob Marly and the Wailers can't succeed because they have set upon a political agenda. So, it's not to say it's not a point of resistance when you make something where the politics of the thing you make is not just implicit, but explicit. You know what I mean. But it's just another reason to rationalize, not facilitating or not publishing a thing or not, as they say, passing the thing forward. Personally, I wouldn't necessarily say, even though one hand I'll saying, hey, American pictures shook people when they saw it, you know. I'll say like I just said it, hey, look! These delusions that we have as American citizens are much harder to sustain. You know they're much harder to sustain in the presence of a work like American pictures. But even though I say those things, I never saw American pictures as a political track. I don't think it's narrowly ideological. It's not a communist manifesto, it is not a Marxist manifest. It's like in a way operating outside of narrow ideas of ideology. I don't feel like when I see it. Like, you know, it'd be one thing if in the book it was just you moving amongst black people in a certain kind of way. But when I see you moving among Klansmen, among gay people, all this kind of stuff, you realize it's free of any kind of narrow ideology. I have books that are, I would call them political books. They're books where a person had a very pointing kind of political agenda. But one of the things that is the genius of American pictures is when you say in the beginning like when I read in the kind of origin myth of how American pictures came to be, that you were writing letters home about the America that you were seeing, and people couldn't believe it because they had certain visions of what America was supposed to be. So, you started taking pictures.

See? That's something that's so pure about that. You know, it's a pure way to get into doing a thing. It's not like you were taking pictures because you were trying to be an artist. You weren’t taking pictures because you were trying to do a survey, or you were working for some NGO, you know, taking pictures to buy in line with some kind of agenda. You were just trying to take pictures of what was in front of you. So, it has a pure impulse at its core. And not only did you just take pictures of what was in front of you, you didn't turn away from anything that you saw. You didn't say, here is now where I can have my camera. But over here I can have my camera. Now, the first thing I asked you when I met you, which is to me as a person, who, I guess, is an artist at this point, as a person who is still trying to figure out how to make better things, more interesting things. You got one question for Jacob Holdt. What's the question to ask? And the first thing I ever asked you was, how do you get these pictures? Not why they’re good, or how are you buzzing. How did you? How did people allow you to take cameras into their bedrooms and to their bathrooms, into their KKK rallies all this kind of stuff? How did you get these pictures. And you just said, “because I had one philosophy, I never said no,” you know, and that's it. It's a hard plus. I don't personally think I'm equipped to do that, because it comes with so much, I mean, you're putting yourself in so much danger. But like, basically, in a way, it's like me saying, you got these very intense pictures of the fire. The fire is all around us. Everything is burning. There's a forest fire. And I say, how did you get these pitches? And you just say, well, I just walk with the fire. Okay, it's really straightforward. You, while with the fire you don’t get burned. It's just as simple as that. But that's the only way to get certain kinds of pictures.

Jacob Holdt

00:19:15

How about the oppressive content in the book? As you'll remember from Alex Soth, the book is very difficult and painful for Americans. Even the most liberal museum directors will quickly skim through it and put it away, and so on. You saw the same in your father's reaction, and so on. There's a cocktail of denial and feeling under attack, and so on. And in Trump's divided America even an angry psychology of blaming the victims has come about.

I deliberately oppress the readers with an endless bombardment of images that deep down they don't want to see, to force them to take responsibility, like I learned from my mentor, Dr. Charles King. The oppressive content in an American context, maybe you could expand a little bit on that.

Arthur Jafa

00:20:31

I mean, I wouldn't term the content oppressive. That's like saying, if a person is a heroin addict and you withheld the heroin that you are oppressing him. You're not oppressing him. It generates a kind of intense response, as if the person is being oppressed. Because, like, I'm saying, the fundamental structure is a structure of denial. It's not a structure of not knowing. You know I love this thing, that Cornel West said. He said that there are things you cannot NOT know as a black person in America. But I also think two things. There are certain things that you absolutely MUST not know as a white person in America. You must not know these things, because if you know these things, you can't enjoy your privilege. You can't utilize your privilege and your access unaffectedly. You know I used to say it this way years ago. I would say, if you look at how the holocaust worked, right? The holocaust is about creating a fundamental belief that Jewish people were not human beings. Right? Why would you need to do this? Because really, if somebody is your enemy you don't really need to do that. You just throw your enemy in a can. That's it, right. But the whole Nazi regime was built around creating this idea that Jewish people are somehow not human, and like honestly in Germany, there's no German cult without German Jews. If you extract German Jews from the history of Germany, it's an ultimate universe. It doesn't look anything like it looks like. Those are the actual, fundamental citizens of Germany. Like the German philosophy, as we understand it, art is completely bound up with German Jews. Right? So, we're not talking about someone from over there, - from outside. That's why Nazis was a kind of cancer, because it was the body acting on itself. But the fundamental act that the Nazis did was to try to create these visions that German Jews were somehow not like somehow, not German, but somehow not human. Now, why is that important?

You know. Okay, you take the Warsaw Ghetto, you take everybody who is Jewish in Germany, and you put them into one little area where 100 people would be cramped, and you put 2,000 people in that same area, right? And then you say Jews are like rats.

They're like rats. Well, if you put anybody in an internment camp there was only built for or can only comfortably contain 10 people. And you put a thousand people in there. Of course, they're gonna behave like rats. Right? Why is that important? Because ultimately the whole structure was about justifying the extermination of Jewish people. Right? In other words, when you get to the death camps. What's really going on is that no human being can effectively kill other human beings without doing something. You can't do that and think you're a good guy. You have to know you're a bad guy, but if I see a roach or a bug in my house like, you know, realistically, I know the pet lovers and all this kind of stuff, if I step on the bug I'm not going to sleep, if I kill a fly, I'm not going to sleep thinking that I've just, you know, burned myself chronically, or I'm not going to get to heaven. It's just a bug and I killed it. It's important if you in a situation where you have to exterminate people on a daily basis, that you don't understand them as human, because if you exterminate the human beings, you can't sustain your ability to do it effectively, meaning it wasn't about whether people could do it or not. You can. People kill human beings all the time. It's the oldest thing that we do. We kill all the human beings.

But when you talk about industrializing structured destruction, white supremacy in America is about the structured disadvantage of blacks. It's not an individual person who decided, “I don't like that person”, for whatever reason. People don't like people all the time for whatever reason. There could be a lot of reasons. But when you have a superstructure, an infrastructure that's informing and verifying and consolidating these ideas, that's something else. So, in a death camp, what you see first and foremost is, people are maintaining the idea that those people there are not less human than you are, they are, in fact, not human. Because you cannot effectively, sustainably do it, if it's human beings. They have to be bugs in order for you to send it to camps. So, it is critical that the super structure can't allow anything that's going to disrupt. Anything that disrupts is a crisis immediately, because you can't do your job. You can oppress people, but you can't effectively, sustainably oppress people. You can't oppress people without seeing yourself as a bad guy. You are the bad guy. The Nazis are the bad guys. They didn't think they were the bad guys. They thought they were good guys. The whole thing was about thinking, if it isn’t exterminated, it comes to your house. They don't think they come into your house to do evil. They think they're coming to get rid the bugs. They're not having a conscious. They're not having a crisis of consciousness when they do that, right. So, they have to reduce human beings to bugs in order to effectively do what they do. A book like American pictures makes it almost impossible to sustain that superstructure, that these people are not human beings. Whatever you think about them, whether you like them or not, it makes it impossible.

Jacob Holdt

00:27:09

But what I mean is also – yes, you can understand how people in the midst of oppression can conduct all these things. But for Germans today that they are related to those people who did those things, this feels very oppressive. And the same thing, I feel, my pictures will probably make young Americans today feel oppressed simply by the accusation that they were part of that.

Arthur Jafa

00:27:32

But what I'm saying. I wouldn't use the word oppressed. I think that the word oppressed is really not the accurate word. It's more like disturbed, destabilized they are destabilized. Destabilizing somebody is very different from oppressing somebody. Oppression is like something where you are trying to immerse the person into your understanding of the world. There's a lot of oppressive structures out here. But you know, if you walk into a room and it's a homophobic room, and you kiss your boyfriend, you're not oppressing anybody. But you are destabilizing their ideas about what's appropriate and what's not appropriate.

Jacob Holdt

00:28:19

Yeah. I think I'll oppressed you the last time by waking you up very early 😊 About today's wokeness; are publishers afraid to publish a book written by a white man today. Today some might call it “cultural appropriation”, or “the white man's gaze”. I feel that it was never a show or a book about black people. I always addressed it to white people, calling it “the Ghetto in our hearts” – “we or us, the white oppressors”, I say throughout it, you know, like Robin Diangelo writes in “Nice Racism”: “I'm not seeking to teach white people about blacks, but to teach white people about ourselves in relation to blacks.”
My foreign outsider status helped me to see people in the underclass, not as blacks or black culture, but as oppressed, as the ultimate victims and proof of our racism. And all oppressions, of course, have victims.
So this is what I thought I would like you to address; today's concern about “the white man's gaze”. And you know, all the accusations I would probably get today by being a white man publishing a book like this.

Arthur Jafa

00:29:44

Well, look, I would say to you, it's a very, very complicated issue, and I'm not here to absolve you of anything. I don't think you need to be involved, right? I don't think it's ever gonna be easy, because this is a complicated terrain that we exist in, you know. It's like, oh, free speech, like, okay, yeah, it is free speech. People get to not like your thing. But you get to do your thing, and you get to not like them not liking your thing. That's what free speech is about. Free discourse is about everybody getting to voice their opinion. So, to me ultimately, it's beside the point, you know. All this shit is beside the point. The thing that matters is that the thing exists. It exists. American Pictures exists, you know. There's a difference between that you are disturbed by the existence of something, and that it doesn't exist.

For example, I was talking to my friend last night, and he was looking at some work. And I say, Yeah, it's really interesting, this idea, what you can do and what you can’t do. My favorite story of all time is Albert Ayler, the jazz musician was playing at a concert, and it was free jazz, which means it wasn't Bebop. It wasn't like the jazz that even though Bebop in his day was considered a radical gesture. And it wasn’t even what Louis Armstrong said about Charlie Parker’s Chinese music, his Oriental music, you know. So, it was a radical gesture in his time, but by the time you get to the early fifties and early sixties you got “free jazz” and Albert Ayler was playing this, and he wasn't doing some of the fundamental things that you would associate with most music, but certainly pop music, and certainly jazz right. He was like not playing the changes, as they say. He was not playing the heads of the music, the melody, or anything. He was just playing, regardless of melody, or anything like that, or even top ideas about what tonality is appropriate and what not. So, there was this guy in the audience who started yelling. He can't do that; He can't do that. He was running around saying, He can't do that. And he saw John Coltrane sitting in the audience, the ultimate authority of what you can, and you cannot do. So, he ran over to John Coltrane and said, stop him, tell him he can't do that. And they said, John Coltrane, very calmly said, “well, apparently, he can, because he's doing it. You just observed that he's doing it.”
This is how I see American pictures. It really, fundamentally doesn't matter what I think about it. It is doing something that is very, very powerful and kind of unique in a way. It's almost like its very existence makes you question everything you've seen. Like it makes it apparent that there is some unspoken rules and regulations. There are some interdictions about even doing certain things. We're not having a conversation about, “well is American Pictures the best version of what it does?” We not having that conversation because there's nothing else. It's amazing that you could do something like it. It's amazing that you could do it then. And there were very few things that you could compare it to. But here we are, 40, 50 years later, and it's still the case. It is still the case that you can barely compare it to anything. That means that it is a thing that is fundamentally going against some very complex and dense structures of what's allowed and what's not allowed - for all the reasons I talked about before. So, I don't know, I'm a little hesitant to say, oh, people have a trouble with it being a white gaze or something like this, you know. I can talk about the white gaze, the black gaze as much as anybody, but I just think it's completely irrelevant in this case where I would just say, I don't care. I don't care. I'm just interested in the conversation about…...

Arthur Jafa

00:34:35

The point I was trying to make about the appropriateness of a thing is very different from a discussion about its existence, I think. Even if you're not very interested in this subject matter, you might be interested in the fact that there's nothing else like it. It's very hard to make anything that there's nothing else like. It's a very, very unique place that it has. Now, the things that I, personally, as you know, I'm fascinated about it is how it does operate outside of these narrow boundaries of what art is supposed to be, what a book is supposed to be. I mean. It's a book. It's art. It's a slideshow, you know what I mean. Like, basically, when you come in contact with it, you're just coming in contact with various iterations of a thing. It's like a glacier, you know, in the water, you see the tip of the iceberg, but most of it is underwater. It's a kind of iceberg that pokes out in all these different ways, in the ways that it pokes out as a book, as a slideshow, or as a political track, as an aesthetic artifact. All these kinds of things are true of it as “a vision of a white man of black people”. All these things are true of it. And they all part of the totality of what it is. But I don't think it needs any justification or verification or anything like that. Not to me, it doesn't.

Jacob Holdt

00:36:25

As the great visual artist, you are, I imagine that you mostly focus on the photographs in my book, and some of them have later on gotten an artistic quality, and they get a bit more space in the new book. But you remember I started photographing for the Black Panthers, and my only vision at the time was to give them to the Schomburg museum in Harlem. And the first photo books I made to get donations from drivers to show them when I hitchhiked. So, I started as a bridge builder, and gradually I felt that I use the pictures in an allegorical way, in a metaphorical way which had a powerful effect on the viewer, and so on. But most publishers of art photo books, they want to throw out all my cinematic flow of small pictures and just make a book like the Steidl book in which the non-threatening artistic photos will not be so oppressive to progressive whites. So, for years I have resisted exhibiting my lifelong friends without my explanatory words in my fear that racists would use my pictures to show that this is how black people. It took me years before I had exhibitions in Europe, because I simply said that my pictures are never going to be up on a wall. They only belong in a story with my interpretation of them. So, okay, if you want to expand a little bit on that side of the photos.

Arthur Jafa

00:38:13

Yeah, of course. I have read the book, but I haven't re-read it, you know. Once I read it, I go back and look at the pictures, but I don't go back to read the text. That's not to say that the text isn't important, or it doesn't matter or anything like that. It's the part that I don’t go back to personally. I think the pictures are strong enough in themselves. I don't need the subtitles. I don't need the wall tag to tell me what it is. Not to get the fundamental power of them, because, as I said, the fundamental power of the photos is that they are like what Cyria Whitney???  called disenchanting. They disenchant people, they break spells, and these spells people are comfortable because it's familiar. They need these spells to function effectively. And like I said, people need these things as they're spell breakers. You know, the book is a book that basically snaps this thing and wakes you up. You know you, you operate on the hypnotism, and you confront them with this thing that will basically snap you out of it in the instant. I don't necessarily think the words are a fundamental part of that. But okay, let's say this. If I want to put my esthetic hat on now, I want to talk about how you make powerful things. I would again say, is it sharp to you? Is it powerfulness? Is it pretty? You know what I mean? Is it a piss pot (???), is it? Pretty? No, it's not pretty, because art is not about just what looks good, but what's pretty. Like, I would say, our metric, or what makes powerful now is to what degree it catalyzes, you know, creates dissonance, creates insight. Like dissonance is an important part of enlightenment. You know what I mean. You have to shake things up to be able to see more clearly. It's like you're involved. It's why, when you're involved, people start doing this with their arms. They start doing like they're in the water because they're trying to clear it, you know. So, I would say, as an aesthetic artifact, what's powerful about it to me is how it resists being contained as any of these things. I mean, there's a real relationship between your work and Nan Goldin’s work. They're real. Most people would admit that Nan Goldin’s masterpiece is “The ballot of sexual dependencies,” which was a slide show. You can't buy it, in a way, as a slide show, because even in the most recent documentary about Nan Goldin, she talks about how “The ballot of sexual dependency” changed every time she presented it. Because it was an infinite set of slides there was something she always repeated, but the order always changed. It was loose. It was a loose artifact. So, she has a career as a photographer, but her a static project is bigger than just being a photographer. It's like still images, but images that fundamentally have to be understood in relationship to each other. Even though, when you sell them and a person frames it, and put it on the wall somewhere, right? You know what I mean. That's almost the antithesis of it in the context of the slideshow. But I think there is a close relationship between how your artifact, how your project exists artistically, and how Nan Goldin’s has existed. You, just for the reasons that you have, which are a completely legitimate reasons, have never been comfortable with these things flying solo, functioning independent of the larger context. That's a philosophical position. That's a political position. And if that's your position that's legitimate. Like my fantasy in my head is like there's an addition of American Pictures. They can turn up the volume on every level. They can have the text at 10, and it could have the pictures at 10. Like I have the Steidl book. It's a nice book. I like so many of those images in it. I feel, like God, this is such a much better printing of the image, a better presentation of the image. But at the same time, I have to acknowledge that it doesn't have the corrosive power, the incantatory power, the disenchanting power of the presentation of those images in American Pictures. But I do think there is a virgin that does both things, a combo of the Steidl thing with more attention to the pictures as pictures at the same time. That's what I would like to see. I would like to see version that doesn't let anybody off the hook, doesn't let the people off the hook who don't want to see it in print, because the printing is bad. Or the photos are not presented, you know, in a seemingly graphically sophisticated way, something like that. You know what I mean, where the balance between the text and the pictures is more calibrated. To me American Pictures is like a jazz set. It's like a jazz set. It's all over the place. It's like going to see a Miles Davis concert like they would say when Miles achieved his truest iterations of what he was. When you will go to a concert, it wouldn't be like “now we're going to play Green Dolphin Street”. And now we're gonna play so and so. Like, when they were introduced to the songs, what it morphed into was this thing where one song morphed into the next song, it never was one song finished and another song started. The boundaries between one song and another were erased. It was like this thing that was permuting the whole time. That's what American Pictures is. It refuses to isolate out the specific things. That's what's incredible about it. That's what's aesthetically challenging about it.

But I think it could be printed better. I think the color correction of the photos could be better. The grading of the photos could be better. Like if you just even took it, the same book. Don't change the structure of it. Don't change the text of it. Don't do anything. This is almost all right. Don't change anything about it except printing the actual photos in the same place on the page better than they are printed. That would be interesting.
(Jacob: Apparently, Jafa is referring to the old bad printings of the book in America).

Jacob Holdt

00:45:25

They are much better today in the new book. But anyway, leave that inside. Yeah, okay, you feel free to edit the new book 😊. As I have said before, also feel free to use all my 22,000 pictures in your videos 😊.
I have a question also about the fear of stereotyping. All the photographers always avoided controversial photos of black drug users, pimps, criminals and so on for fear of stereotyping. In my book I want to honestly explain why I think these stereotypes exists, first of all they exist in the white mind, and why they have been internalized in so many black minds. To help educate people in racist societies about why such conditions exist, you know. But you know how American photographers would mostly stay away from photographing from that side of a black society. What would you say about that, if anything?

Arthur Jafa

00:46:46

Yeah, what you say? You know, I mean, stereotypes exist. The context in which we operate. It's like the ocean. You can have a breaststroke, or a butterfly struck, or whatever. But you gotta get wet. It's no not getting wet. If you point a camera at black people, you're already in a very charged problematic terrain. Like I have actually made a series of films where I never wanted to point a camera at a black person when I was talking to them. So, I would interview them, do the audio, and then I would take pictures of them. But I would never interview them while I was taking pictures of them. And it generated some very interesting artifacts, some very interesting things like somebody saying, “so you say we should never use cameras on people?”
I said, no, I'm not saying that. I'm just saying if you point a camera at a black person, you're already in the realm of the ocean, where it's already full. When you go there, there's nothing you're gonna do if you're standing in the ocean to not make a ripple. It's gonna happen because you're in the ocean. I remember when I was much, much younger in university there was a filmmaker, an African film who came and showed this film - I can't even remember the name of the film, but it's stuck with me for 40 years. And after he showed the film, we were having a discussion with him and he said, “Do you know where a griot comes from? You know what a griot is in Africa? Or a historian?”
You know the person who understands and retains the myths. I said I knew what a griot was, that they come from Africa? He said, “But do you know the origin story of how Griots came about?” No, no, no, I don't think I do. And I'm gonna try to do a quick version of this myth. He told me there were two brothers who were taking this very, very long journey epic journey, like any other epic journey, Ilijada or Odyssey, or whatever. They went away from their village, and they had all these adventures. You know, they had all these experiences and as with the Odyssey at some point they had to come back home. So, they were making their way back home, after having been on the road for years and years and years. And as they were getting closer and closer to their village, they were exhausted. I mean the years on the road had just really taken this toll on them to the point that one of the brothers realized; “I don't have enough energy and strength to make it home. I'm going down on this road. I know I'm going down this road because I'm starving, I'm exhausted. I don't want to jeopardize my brother’s ability to get home. So, he said to his brother, Look, I'm tired right now. I'm going to take a little break. I'm gonna take a nap, but you just keep on walking, and when I wake up, I'll catch up with you. I'm gonna take a nap on the side of the road. So, his brother said, hm, okay, cool, I'm gonna keep walking and you catch up with me in a little bit. The brother laid on the side of the road, and he prepared to die. He knew he didn't have enough energy, and he didn’t want to slow his brother, his fellow traveler, down. He laid on the road, prepared to die close his eyes. His brother continued to walk. At a certain moment the brother said, Where's my brother? He didn't catch up with me. I'm walking a little slower than I normally would, so he can catch up. I better go back and check on him. He went back to check on him and saw his brother lying on the side of the road with his eyes closed. He realized immediately what had happened that he was laying there to die. So, he took his knife, rolled his pants leg up and cut his own calf off his leg. And he made a fire, and he cooked his own calf. He cooked it. He woke his brother up and said, Look, I found food to eat, so you'll be strong, and you'll get your strength, and we can make it home. So, his brother it ate the food, got his strength back, they got up and they continued their walk. Eventually they made it home together. When they got home people cheered because “we haven't seen these, our sons, we haven't seen them in years.” They all cheered, and the cheer almost immediately turned into people screaming. Because they looked down at the brother’s leg, and they saw his leg bleeding and they knew immediately what had happened, and the brother who had eaten his brother's flesh looked down at his brother. He knew immediately what had happened. He had consumed the flesh of his brother.
So the guy who told me this story said, “You know why this is important? Where I come from the griots are very powerful because they retain the cultural information. They know what's what, what things have in relationships to other things, but when they die, they don't bury them with everybody else. They put griots bodies in hollow trees and let the maggots eat them. Why is that? Why do you think that is?” He said it's because as powerful as griots are, they feed on the flesh of the people. It's necessary in order to survive, but they do feed on the flesh of people. So, the brother who had eaten his brother's flesh, the guy said, the first griot come from him, turning to his brother and saying to him. Hey? From this point forward I'm going to sing praise songs of your sons and your daughters, and my sons and daughters are going to sing the praise of your sons and daughters. So, he said, what is the point? Why am I telling you this? Because I experienced this growing up, when you're uncomfortable around your family and your friends and stuff, because they know instinctively that the way you're wired is to take notes about what's happening around you to document, whether it's a photograph or a drawing or a story you wrote down. You're taking pictures of their lives. You are feeding on their flesh, right? And so as much as they need you and may even love you, they're always gonna be a little uncomfortable around you. And what he said to me was something I never forgot. He said, that if your calling is to document these things, to make pictures, renderings of these things, people's love, people's heartache and these kinds of things, the blues. If you are here to document people's struggles, emotional, psychological, political, physical, spiritual. If your calling is to document these things, you gotta understand you’re a vampire. And you have to accept that. You have to accept the tension, the dissonance that comes with that. You gotta accept the blowback. So that's all I would say to you, Jacob, you are an incredible vampire, you are really an incredible vampire.

Jacob Holdt

00:54:53

Yeah, ha, ha. So, it’s like you’re absolving my guilt with that griot story 😊

 

Arthur Jafa

00:55:59

I am not absolving your guilt. I'm saying that ….accept your guilt, ha, ha.

 

Jacob Holdt

00:54:53

Talking about the flesh of the people, you know that in America my use of a few semi-nude photos has always been controversial. In today's feminist wokeness, will publishers be nervous about my so-called “black exploitation”? Even though I describe in my new book my exact relationship with these few black women and how our friendship has lasted for a lifetime and continues today. I still sit and write with them almost every day.

Arthur Jafa

00:55:59

That's cool. But it's a rationalization. I'm saying that you got accept that a vampire is a vampire, ha, ha. You know, I mean the fact that you are friends, and that you love the person and I respect the feeling, that's ultimately beside the point, okay? It's like, I love this person, this person who you've known, for at this point most of your adult life. That's the person I continue to return to, and know when I show up, they hold their arms out, take a trip. And it's a symbiotic relationship. But it is a relationship, and people are gonna have a problem with it. I would say, like, Caravaggio, he made his paintings with pimps and prostitutes. It was a problem in his day. He was a murderer. He murdered a couple of people, you know. But when people stand and look at the pictures now, they just see the pictures, because all that stuff at the time that was problematic with the thing fades. And what's left is the thing, not the original context of the thing, not your ideologies about the thing. What's left is the thing.
I'm not saying your engagement with disabusing people’s ideas they have about what the actual nature of your relationship is to people whose pictures you have taken. In some cases, you took the person's picture, and you never saw them again. In some cases, you took the person's picture, and they've been lifelong friendships. I'm saying, it doesn't really matter at the end of the day.

Jacob Holdt

00:57:42

Yeah. I especially have doubts about including my relationship with Sapphire, who made the movie “Precious” and how we shared ideas about oppression and sexual abuse in the black community. Because sexual abuse is the root cause of so much white terrorism and black crime?

Arthur Jafa

00:58:12

Oh, yes, tell me. No, that's important. That's important. I didn't really know about your relationship with her (showing that he had not read my new book). Actually, I love Sapphire’s work. Even before “Precious” she had this poem called “Mickey Mouse was a Scorpio” used as a title of the work. I love that poem. Incredibly powerful. But again, look, man, you are a griot, accept that.

Jacob Holdt

00:58:35

When we met, and I lived with her in Harlem the eighties for a couple of years, we just had completely the same ideas about oppression and self-oppression, how oppressed people oppress each other, and so on. She had been an outsider, she called herself a hippie, or whatever, walking the streets just as I had been a vagabond for many years, but we have somehow reached the same conclusions about the oppressive patterns in society, and that's what sort of hooked us up etc. I was later introducing her movie in Denmark, and she came over here, and we continued our work on sexual abuse in Denmark many years later. It's only a couple of years ago, but we had a strong, strong friendship. But I have doubts about, you know, “The Color Purple”, and all these books about incest in the black community. They were not very popular in the black community, so I'm a bit afraid of including that topic.

 

Arthur Jafa

01:00:12

“The Color Purple” was very popular in the black community. I mean, it just created this dissonance.

Jacob Holdt

00:58:35

Ok, well then “Precious” … Maya Angelou’s and all the others…

Arthur Jafa

01:00:12

But that's a perfect example, “The Color Purple,” you mention. That is a perfect example of a work that created a dissonance because it wasn't making anything up. People just said, don't show our dirty laundry. That's what black people a lot of people in the black community said. But there’s no dirty laundry on display. You are basically verifying or giving evidence to people who want to construct that black people are not being human. But we know all of that is false.

Jacob Holdt

01:00:48

Yeah. Okay. You haven't read my new chapter about the KKK, where I am trying to understand them, because I've been working intensely with the Ku Klux Klan for several years, to find out what drives them, and then also found out that the same thing is the case for them concerning sexual abuse in childhood….

Arthur Jafa

01:02:09

Yes, totally agree.

Jacob Holdt

01:00:48

….and their shame I feel, which is so similar to what I found in so much of the black underclass that I try to make the connection there between poor blacks and the Ku Klux Klan as provocative as it is. Because I think we need a new understanding of oppression. You can’t just see the KKK as bad people, they are people, and we have to try to understand what forms them etc. But it's dangerous, I know that. Whenever I've written about the KKK, on Instagram, and so on, there's always some backs who will misunderstand it…


Arthur Jafa

01:02:09

Maybe they're not. Maybe they're understanding it perfectly. Or you just have to accept that they don't like it.

Jacob Holdt

01:02:16

Yeah. Well, anyway. So, the text you haven't seen so much in the new one. In the new book, I make a lot of comparisons with other oppressions such as Muslim immigrants in Europe whom I have worked a lot with. And casts and tribes around the world. Also, in an American context, to help Americans get out of their own trap of local black/white thinking. For oppression is a universal problem, everywhere in the world, as we see right now in Kosovo between Serbs and Albanians. So don't think you are alone 😊


Arthur Jafa

01:02:52

Yes, that is true, it is a one strategy trying to have people understand that these things are sort of manifestations of this around the world. But look, slavery in the US is a very, very specific thing. It's kind of like, what if the concentration camps weren't ovens to kill people? But they put Jewish people in there to crossbreed with Jewish people and then try to by crossbreeding them out of existence. That's what slavery was like.

Jacob Holdt

01:03:46

I'll just say that I just the all day saw a new Danny's movie made by black people about Danish slavery in the Virgin Islands, and I felt that it was not artistically that good, but that was the first honest portrayal I'd seen about Danish slavery, because it was …..

Arthur Jafa

01:02:52

Ha, ha, people could say the same thing about American Pictures. It's not artistically that good, but it is an honest portrayal 😊

Jacob Holdt

01:03:46

…..it was the first time showing blacks oppressing blacks within the structure of oppression. Everyone in such a system of oppression are victims.

Arthur Jafa

01:02:52

(??? Hitler) was a victim, too. He was a victim of his circumstances he was born into. But come on so.

Jacob Holdt

01:03:46

So my book is not about blacks, but about whiteness today in all it's oppressive forms. And that's why I made a comparison to your “White Album”. I don't know what if you want to make a connection there, your White Album about whiteness?

Arthur Jafa

01:04:57

I mean. Look, there's this way I've learned. I try to flow with it. There's what people say about a work, and there's the way you understand it, right. If you look at the White Album. If you actually measure the ratio of white people to black people in it, there's just as many black people in it as they are white people in it. Sometimes they are doing things or saying things, or behaving in a way that might seem to be in some sort of complex rhetorical relationship to the white people around you. And sometimes they aren’t. Sometimes they just do what they want to do, like Erica who is in there. She isn't saying anything about white people, she is just basically in there doing her thing, you know. And so yeah, you call it the white album. So of course, people gonna be white people, you know. It was always a bit of a joke to me. It was like always a bit like, man, people respect or fear Love is the message. And now you're making a thing that centers around white people. They're really gonna like that 😊 You know what I mean, because it's narcissism. It's a narcissistic relationship. You know, white people - this is a generalization - they would rather be bad guys in black art than not exist in black art. Because of their narcissism. You must be thinking about me. You must be processing me. I have to be at the center of the universe. And a lot of my work, the majority of my work by far is about not operating like that. No, I don't have to have white people in my work. I don't have to have white people my work to make intelligent, passionate, dissonant, troubling, beautiful work. All of those things are possible without showing one white person or touching white people in any explicit kind of fashion. It doesn't mean I don't show white people my work because I am free of that. I'm free of the whole idea that I must show them, or that I can't show them. I show them when and how I want to. And nothing deeper than that. You know what I mean? I curated a Mapplethorpe show a couple of years ago. I mean, certainly not on my book list of things to do. Barbara Gladstone asked me if I would be interested in curing this Mapplethorpe show. Sure, why not? I grew up looking at those Mapplethorpe pictures. They are amazing pictures. They’re undeniably great art. And I said, Yeah, what do I have to do? You just pick or choose the ones you want to show. So, they sent me a Pdf or a file that had all these Mapplethorpe pictures for me to look through. I looked at them. I just had one rule, if you want to call it rules. Not really a rule. But I have one thing, I would say, operative, the operative principle. I just didn't want to show the pictures that everybody had seen a million times. There's a lot of masterpieces that everybody has seen a lot. So, I kind of avoided those, but beyond that I just picked the pictures I liked. Now, it came out. I think it was very well received. A lot of people thought it was an important show. And at the opening I spoke to Michael Stout. I think he's the head of the Mapplethorpe Foundation, and he came up and said to me, I think everybody was happy with the show, but you know we almost canceled the show. - I said, no, I had no idea you almost canceled it. Why? - He said, because we wanted to understand what you're thinking was about the pictures that you had selected. - I said, well, I didn't know that. - He said, Yeah, Barbara and the gallery didn't want us to disturb you so, they were running interference. Eventually I did have a conversation with them before the show opened, but it was after I had made the selections, and it was a done deal. The thing I remember most about the conversation was them saying, We're curious about your thinking about your selections. - And I said, I don't have any thinking about my selections. I just picked the pictures I liked, and I tried to put them in an interesting relationship to each other. Meaning that I didn't have an axe to grind. I didn't have an ideology, I mean, I have an ideology, but I mean, I didn't organize them in accordance with some political or ideological agenda. I just picked the pictures that I thought would do, that we hadn’t seen a thousand times. I tried to emphasize the kinds of things that we see less frequently of Mapplethorpe. I tried to put those things that we see less frequently from Mapplethorpe in a larger context of the kinds of things we're more familiar with, or associate with Mapplethorpe. That was it.

Now I bring that up just to say, it's like again there's always possible iterations of the thing. Like to me that was a remix. I guess I'm just making a pitch but let me remix your book. Maybe that's what I'm making a pitch at because I do think your pictures as pictures can be presented as powerfully as Mapplethorpe’s pictures. Pictures are pictures, but without erasing any of the other things that matter to you, context, nuance, insight, the narrative around how these pictures came into being, your larger relationship with the subjects of your photos. These are a lot of things that are typically masked over in almost any photographer’s work. Yeah, sometimes there're narratives about who the people were, what the relationship of the photographer was. But you know, they, these ideas that we know are inherently bound up with the aesthetics of how photographers will understand it. Like one of which is objectivity. Like these myths of being objective like you are the camera, and you’re not behind the camera. These are false narratives. These are post narratives. So, your work is going against the grain in SO many ways. I just think I would like to see a version of American pictures where the American part, the picture part, got as much love and as much care and as much nuances, I know you attend to around your language, you know. And I'm not saying you don't care about the pictures at all. I'm not saying that at all. But I'm just saying that's the version of American pictures that I would like to see.

Jacob Holdt

01:12:36

Now when you compare with other photographers, I have a good friend in New York, Raymond Meier. He wants to make my portfolios of my photos on Dye-transfer. He made William Eggleston’s photos that way and sold them for a fortune on Christi’s. He would love to make all of mine, too, you know.

Arthur Jafa

01:12:55

(Enthusiastically) Yes, every picture in American Pictures should be a dye transfer.

Jacob Holdt

01:12:36

We got started on it, but he didn't finish it.
But you mentioned the William Eggleston story. (Jafa first contacted me because his dream always was to have a picture taken with him holding hands with both Eggleston and me). Tell the story how we first connected. You wanted a picture of us two holding hands with you or something, you know. Just try to tell it in the funny way how we first connected. Yeah.

Arthur Jafa

01:13:42

Yeah, I'm trying to have fun, ha, ha. I'm trying to have fun around what I'm doing. I'm trying to understand my drives and my impulses to challenge them, but not accept them, you know. There’re certain things I've learned, you know, that was such a loose instance me being able to understand. Because I have friends who say, sometimes when I'm around you, I feel like I'm a bug, like you're just studying me. You study. You're not relating to me. You're studying me. Over years, I would say that hasn't receded me studying people. But what has receded is people being uncomfortable with it, because I'm just so much better at masking it. But I have a fundamental acceptance of like I'm saying at core, I'm a raba…??? I'm just much, much better at hiding it and countering it or counterbalancing it than I was when I was younger.

Jacob Holdt

01:14:52

Anyway, people say I should ask you about comparisons, and that's what they often have in Forewords, comparisons with other photographers. We talked about William Eggleston and Nan Goldin. And what about the Diane Arbus and Birney Imes and of course, outsiders like Robert Frank and Jacob A. Riis, and so on.

Arthur Jafa

01:15:13

Those are the obvious names that will come up, Jacob, when I said, there's nothing else like American Pictures in my mind. That will be the closest analog to what you've done with American Pictures. I mean off the top of my mind, you'd kind of just almost went through the quick list of everybody. I mean the Robert Frank, that makes sense because his greatest pictures were on the road. You understand that relationship? And yeah, Diane Arbus with her ability to look at the demented, the oppressed and the overt horror of American society. How in American society we're all freaks! This is a society of freaks. So, they're not aberrations. They are the product of this America. You see that in her work. I always think of her work now in relationship to Roger Ballen in his South African photography with pictures of white South Africans primarily, where you could see there's a lot of inbreeding and things like that. There's something about Diane Arbus photos, they kind of do that with his photos too. William Eggleston is the obvious counter figure, I think, because it's in some ways the same terrain, but a totally different approach. He is a genteel Southerner, you know, with the skin of plantation owners and stuff. He's got that's embedded in his work. I think what makes his work great is that it is not all that is there. But as esthetic artifacts they are obviously really incredible. Like Mapplethorpe said they are artifacts??? It's like a person that's great, you can't reduce the person to what they look like. You can't reduce them to what they think. You can't reduce them to like what they are products of, you know, a complex work is just like a person. You can't reduce it to one thing. It's always doing multiple things, because the embodiment or the being of the thing is complex, and it exists on a lot of different dimensionalities. It's functions in multiple dimensionalities, not just one. It's not just historical. It's not just aesthetic. It's not just, are you attracted to them? Like one of the things, I fundamentally have – not a I struggle with - but I've thought about my entire life as a sexual being is the difference between who you are attracted to and who you get down with. Like obviously you can see a woman and think she's very beautiful, or a guy. You get in bed with them, and it's not a good hook up, even though they still are your optical ideal. Or a person who is less your optical ideal, but your actual physical interaction with them is more powerful. That discrepancy, that is something I've been fascinated with my whole life. Because you would think your erotic ideal optically would be perfectly aligned with your actual physical, erotic ideal. And it's not the case. And I think it's also true of art in general. There can be things about photos that won't let you turn away. And at the same time, as you say, you find oppressive, you find problematic, you find destabilizing. But you still can't turn away. So, to me that's not something to run away from. To me that is the very nature of my personal message around what it is, I think, is great.

So, when I see American Pictures, I don't think it's printed very well, but it's still incredibly powerful despite that. And sometimes you have to think through if it is powerful because it's not printed well. Ha, ha, it's what I call a a deaf asset. A deaf asset, a deficit that's been turned to an asset. So, you want to work through; is it powerful because it's printed badly? Or is it powerful IN SPITE OF being printed badly. And if you printed it like a master printer printed it, would it be less powerful? Or as powerful? Or more powerful? We don't know. We don't know until we see it.

Jacob Holdt

01:20:23

It's funny that you talked about Nan Golden because I was introducing her movie in Danish movie theaters recently and did a big lecture on it. But when first I was approached about it, I asked the theater director, “why do you want me to talk about her?” And he said, “Oh, I assumed you were one of those she had been in bed with. (AJ laughing) So I had to get up on stage and defend myself. I lived next to her on the Lower East Side for years, but we never went to bed with each other 😊.
But anyway, so many ideas come up. Lærke Rydal, who made your catalogue here, you remember (holding it up). She asked me to ask you what you think is the most important about my pictures? I think you already answered it. She is helping me to transcribe this afterwards. So, what do you think is the most important?

 

Arthur Jafa

01:21:34

Yeah, I mean, I'll take one more stab at it, maybe like a sound bite version of it. The most important thing about your pictures is how unflinching they are. They aren't flinching. I don't think I ever seen photos that are as unflinching.  I've never seen a photo more unflinching than your photos. And in addition to that unflinchingness of it, they're not like photos like ambulance chaser photos stations. A lot of people might accuse you of being an ambulance chase, what they call an ambulance chaser. You just want to show what is the tragedy behind it. They're not like photos where you just run into a burning house and take pictures and say, “Hey, nobody's ever got here, because I'm in the burning house.” They are despite the sort of unflinching - and as a consequence - startling nature of the photos, they are quite nuanced. And I think that's something that gets missed quite often is this rare combination of a thing being unflinching and being nuanced or so. I think that's something that probably doesn't get attended to. But it's the thing that I think I most like about them, that is the unflinchingness of it, despite their capacity to go right into, as they say, the harder darkness to step right into it. I don't think they ever step into that harder darkness without beautifully rendering the context that they find, I would say beautiful.
Maybe not printed well, but beautiful pictures… (laughing)

Jacob Holdt

01:20:23

Ha, ha, I think you must have gotten one of those badly printed East German versions of my book, you know, that was on bad Communist paper at that time.

Arthur Jafa

01:21:34

Well, I got a bunch of the editions like this, ha, ha. I have got 4 or 5 editions of them. And bad is not bad, you know it's so relative. It's so relative. That may be the baddest version ever, but you know, I would say, like James Brown when he says I'm super bad. What that means is, it is unrepentantly, unapologetically doing what it is doing.

Jacob Holdt

01:24:29

Have you ever among all the photographers, seen anybody - like Nan Goldin - also following their photographic victims for 50 years? Personally, this is what I'm most proud of, how I kept tracking them down in all kinds of new places in this country where there is no central registry where you can find them. Whenever they moved, I always tracked them down.

Arthur Jafa

01:24:53

I would like to see those pictures showing them like years later. You know, there are people, what's the photographer? Who took the pictures of his 4 daughters, and he took the pictures over and over. But you just said, “my photographic victims.” You call them photographic victims (laughing).

Jacob Holdt

01:25:24

Well, they were victims of my photography, but they didn't know it at the time. But it bound us together for a lifetime in a project. They came up on stage and I introduced them in my shows all over.

Arthur Jafa

01:25:54

Yeah, I would love to see a photo book about that, the aftermath of American Pictures.

Jacob Holdt

01:27:17

Well, that will be too big, my book is already too big. Lærke Rydal also asked if there is anything you have learned from my photography? Is that a stupid question?

Arthur Jafa

01:27:24

Yes, I've learned that there's a feature in trying to be un-flinching, that there's an aesthetic self-apprecation?? (self-appreciation?), self-authorizing you know, looking at the things you cannot NOT know, even though we know people have all kinds of structures to not NOT know the things that they cannot NOT know their counter-structures. And that there is a juice there, there is heat there, there's power there, and that you shouldn't necessarily question your impulse. That's what I've learned. You shouldn't question your griot, your vampire, your cuel?, your zombie impulse? I mean, you should question it in the sense that you should interrogate it and understand it in its fullest complexity. But you shouldn't necessarily feel like it's a fundamentally problematic impulse, the nature of the impulse. So those are the things that I feel I've learned from American Pictures.