HOLLOWAY: I’m not a spring chicken. That’s the thing, I’ve been doing this for a long time. You know, when I think about going to see editors, it’s a problem in the industry where people really want you to specialize and say, “Oh there’s one thing that I do.” But, photographers are curious, you know? They want to stick their nose in everything that they can. So personally, I’ve done that, but I had a lot of time where I was really trying to develop myself and I would present myself as one thing to one group of people and I would present myself as another thing to another group of people. And the Nazi work – probably only two people had seen it for the first 10 years.

JETT: We can start there, because you’ve been covering and documenting white nationalism in America since 1991. So that’s 28 years. What is driving your enduring interest in that group?

HOLLOWAY: I’m from the middle of the country and I grew up around this stuff in kind of a casual way. Like, in the south, especially when I was a kid, I’d go to someone’s family cookout and everyone had some cousin or some uncle who was the guy who’s in the Klan. Maybe the family didn’t like him, but he was always at the cookout, so you always knew that those guys were there.

And when I was in college there was a guy that I went to school with who was very vocal and very adamant about his his beliefs. His name is Billy Roper. We had school directories and so a friend of mine said “Look if you really want to do this, this guy’s the real deal. He’s going to do dark and terrible things and he’s right here.” So I wound up calling him one day and we had a meeting in our school library. It was a funny sort of clandestine meeting in the darkest corner of the basement of the school library. And when I looked back on it later, he had a bag on the table in between us. I shot some pictures of him from that. But then as I got to know him later I realized that he always has a gun in that bag. And so then I was like “What the fuck? You brought a gun to meet me?” And he is like “I say a lot of offensive things. I don’t always know what to expect from people, you know?”

I wound up photographing him for all of college, in my free time. Then, I had an incident where I was walking to campus and there were two guys sitting on that bed of a truck with a Confederate flag mounted on a pole in the back. They were drinking beer and hanging out, pretty common sight in Arkansas. I stop and talk to them. Taking some pictures, then our conversation turns into kind of a debate, which turns into me getting my ass beat. Smashed my camera. Knocked my tooth out. Tore my clothes. And then they drove off and I limped back to campus mumbling, “Screw this. I need to stay pretty. I don’t need any of these guys in my life.” And so I cut ties with all of them.

Fast forward to September 11th, 2001. I lived near the Pentagon. I covered that stuff in D.C. and then the next day all of the Associated Press articles ended with a quote from this guy, Billy Roper, the very same guy I went to school with. He’d said “I wish our members had the testicular fortitude to pursue their beliefs in this fashion. And I may not agree with their politics but anybody who’s willing to fly a plane into a building to kill Jews is all right by me.” It mentioned that he was deputy membership coordinator of National Alliance, which is a group that he was a member of before. But he had risen through the ranks and at the time they were the largest white power group in the country. So I called their hotline. I left a message, because they screen all the calls, and said “This is a message for Billy Roper. ‘Hey Billy, I saw you in the paper. Thought I’d reach out.’” And then he calls me back like five minutes later. “Holloway. Oh my God. So happy to hear from you. I’ve been looking for you.” And I go “Well I’m not going to lie, I’ve been dodging you. But I want to talk to you about getting back on the horse and finishing my project.”

So then I drove to see him in West Virginia at their organization’s headquarters and met a bunch of those guys and then just got back into it. It was a really good time to reinvest in the project because there was a lot of anti-Muslim sentiment at the time and so these groups had kind of evolved in this way, you know, your lovely wonderful aunt would wind up at some rally with these guys, because people were afraid of everything. So I doubled down and I spent another decade just kind of grinding away on that.

