Jacob Holdt spent five years hitchhiking a hundred thousand miles across America, taking more than fifteen thousand pictures and developing them with the money he made selling his own blood. His photos, which he never intended to take in the first place, are a comprehensive documentary of class and race in 1970s America.

Holdt was hitchhiking from Canada to Mexico, not planning to stay in the US, but he found something in America that most people born here never seem to notice. He saw the violence and hatred endemic to this country firsthand and resolved to understand it, so he traveled from ghetto to ghetto and lived with the most marginalized of America’s citizens. He seems to have an almost supernatural ability to make friends with anybody, which allowed him access to not only crime-ridden slums but KKK meetings, the Rockefeller family and even the American Indian Movement’s occupation of Wounded Knee.

Nowadays he lectures, tours with his show and works for the poor all over the world. He also maintains this staggeringly enormous collection of email jokes.

Holdt’s site is a bit disorganized, but there’s so much fantastic stuff on there you can hardly blame him. He’s struck a wonderful balance between hubris and humility, detailing the mindset, methods (or lack thereof) and circumstances that got him in and out of all the unimaginable places without ever coming off as anything but geniune. See his short biography, a political interpretation and “How I made my pictures“.

“That I am so often seen in America as someone who has accomplished the impossible may actually say more about the feelings of powerlessness in American youth today than about me.“