Jacob Holdt & the KKK

This is a photograph taken by Jacob Holdt, the work of whom I first encountered at the Louisiana Art Museum in Denmark in the Fall of 2009. I was immediately struck by Holdt's depictions of American life, especially of those outcasted by mainstream society. Holdt spent years befriending and living amongst members of the Ku Klux Klan and walked away from the experience convinced that those belonging to the major hate organization were actually creatures in desperate need of love and understanding.

Holdt writes, "And so I here learned my first important lesson on the Ku Klux Klan; that its need for love far, far surpasses its need to hate. Since then I have unremittingly preached that love is the only way to cure racism, but if I had not had it so dramatically demonstrated during my Klan-friend's powerful spiritual struggle and my own sweat dripping doubts that night, my words would long ago have sounded hollow in my own ears. For my trust in him was precisely not a matter of being "blind" or "naive", but a choice. A choice about not abandoning human beings in the very moment when they appear most terrifying--behind a gun in the ghettos or a burning cross in the woods--just when their shrill cry for help reveals that they need you the most."

This image is particularly important to me because I believe that it embodies my understanding of the threads that connect all of humanity. I recently graduated from an Evangelical Christian college and while it was not exactly the Ku Klux Klan I learned many of the same lessons there that Holdt did during his time with the KKK. I hold deeply to the belief that all humans are searching for the same love, validation, and redemption and lifestyle is often merely just a matter of whichever path seems to usher in these principles in the most effective way possible. I think that Holdt's photography embodies this understanding of the human condition in a telling yet remarkably simple way.

Lindy