He was looking for adventure. But when the young Dane Jacob Holdt arrived in the U.S. in the 1970s, he found a country deeply divided - and spent the next five years photographing that divergence. His photos, now on display in Braunschweig, show a haunting America.

Jacob Holdt was young and angry when he set off 40 years ago to change the world. Angered by the Vietnam War and full of fierce idealism, the young Dane wanted to travel to Chile in the spring of 1970 to fight for socialism and to support the Marxist politician Salvador Allende, who would become the country's president later that year.

Holdt had nothing but contempt and hatred for his homeland of Denmark. "Smash all the windows in the country!" he wrote to a friend, expressing his anger about Danish support for U.S. foreign policy in Southeast Asia. "Smash all of Denmark's windows so that even the coldest conservatives can smell the stench of napalmed flesh."

Looking for adventure, Holdt, the 23-year-old son of a pastor, had planned to start his trip in Canada and travel to Chile via the United States. But on the way to South America, he encountered so much injustice, misery and poverty in the U.S. that he abandoned his plans. He was shocked and at the same time fascinated by the contradictions of American society and wanted to experience those paradoxes for himself.

The young Dane went to all the places that other people avoided. He lived in predominantly African-American slums together with prostitutes, drug addicts, gays and even a murderer. But he was also a guest of the white upper class and mixed with the wealthy offspring of bankers and businessmen. "I had been on the highest peaks and I had been in the deepest shadowy depths with one foot in the grave of America," he wrote later.