Blindly falling in love By art critic Rune Gade The great widths, the height to the sky, the calving icebergs. It is the almost inhumane grandness of the nature, we typically associate with tales from Greenland. In the 27-year old Jacob Aue Sobols first book 'Sabine' we meet a totally different version of the country, a strong personal tale of his Greenland adventure through the young woman Sabine, who the photographer falls in love with. Two stories intertwine: the story about the Dane's meeting with Greenland and Jacobs meeting with Sabine. The cultural meeting and the love are portrayed side by side, or rather as two sides of the same story. Sabine is Greenland. Despite the simplification of the woman and the unexplored land can awake misgivings of imperialistic masculine-controlled tales from dark continents, Sobol successfully avoids such clichĂŠs. For example by not telling his stories in other ways than glimpses and bits from different episodes, that never provides us with lucidity, but only allows us to feel some connections and patterns of acknowledgement. Moreover the stories are intimate and humble, structured by daily almost diary-like observations. Jacob Aue Sobol portrays in words and pictures, black and white photographs and short often lyrical pieces of literature. In many ways it is the same story that is told in pictures and words, with many obvious connections between the photographs and the text. The style however of these are of a totally different tone. Where the text remains laconic and matter-of-fact despite a subjective storyteller, the photographs differ, but are constantly dramatic and expressive. Together they create a contrapuntal mosaic of intimate registrations and sensations from everyday life in the small settlement 'Tiniteqilaaq' in East Greenland, where Sobol lived in the period 1999-2002 for a few years. Everyday pictures Especially the books picturesque side stands out. The black and white photographs dance euphorically around Sabine and the simple life in the small houses that make up the settlement. It is the detail-searching close-ups and portraits full of tone and temper that characterize this part of the book, that only exceptionally are broken off by landscape and hunting photographs. The closed-up and encircled reality of life in the settlement is recreated almost consequently in
pictures without horizon. Rather than presenting us to areas of endless width, Sobol shows us darkness, the immense power of snow and fog – not only as something we should fear, but also as tempting, obsessing forces of nature, like blind love. The literary part of the book is differently homogenous and monotonous, without the photographs' playful and unforced experiments with material, unsharpness and displacement of perspective. Even though the text with its diary like notes and descriptions openly tries to level with the photographs in a snapshot manner, they never quite equal the quality of these. Paradoxically it is too certain in its style, to consequent in its constant telegram-like minimization of the language. The text's ”snapshots” lean towards the melodramatic, whereas the pictures, by their informal liveliness, seem differently engaging and temperamental . The photographs are simply much more expressive than the text, which creates an unfortunate imbalance between the two parts of the book. Even though the frequency for publication of photographic books has increased strikingly in Denmark within the last 10 years, it is still a rarity that a book as Sabine sees the light of day. The autobiographical genre, which on the international art scene has increased enormously lately, has reached new originality with Sobol's book. With Sobol's young age in mind we must acknowledge this very beautiful book of substantial content as particularly promising. The ambitions, the enthusiasm and the talent are visibly present.