Title of a book by
Jacob Holdt, much like
How the Other Half Lives by
Jacob Riis. Holdt came from
Denmark to the
United States, and toured the country as a
vagabond for five years in the early 1970's. He took tens of thousands of
pictures, and later published them with commentary as
American Pictures.
The book exposes far more vividly than most people like to see, the effect of oppression on minorities and poor people. While it is not as graphic as many things we routinely see, it is much more disturbing, since everything in the pictures is a scene from a real person's day-to-day life. The commentary is similar, telling the stories of many of the people in the photographs. Here are two passages:
"...as a vagabond you cannot survive without seeing people themselves as without sin. Otherwise you would soon be eaten up inside by hatred and thereby close yourself off from the world around you."
"Your own fear of people can be overcome, because it is irrational and unfounded in reality, but you are powerless in the face of other people's fear of you: it immediately locks you up in a ghetto."