spaceships:

From the NYT’s photography blog, Lens:

The Danish photographer Jacob Holdt has devoted his life to an epic photographic telling of American racism.

His Web site, American Pictures, contains thousands of photographs documenting the lives of both black and white Americans, the underclass and the privileged. He has befriended and lived with his subjects; the poorest and the wealthiest, the migrant workers and the members of the Ku Klux Klan. He has become intimately involved in his subjects’ lives and photographed them in a fresh, direct style that turned out to have been years ahead of its time.

From 1971 to 1975, he hitchhiked across America, a penniless vagabond who said he sold his blood twice a week to pay for film for the inexpensive half-frame Olympus camera that his parents had given him. (The half-frame camera could shoot twice as many photographs as a full-frame camera. Therefore, both the cost and the quality were lower.)

Mr. Holdt has traveled tens of thousands of miles across this country, staying with his subjects and often eating in soup kitchens. (”United States 1970-1975” was published in 2007 by Steidl & Partners.)

This tall man with a long white beard braided in the center took this year’s New York Photo Festival by storm [but] he was almost unknown to the American photographic community until now.

Wow. How did such a moving, thought-provoking important body of work stay so obscure for so long?