Distance and intimacy By Rune Gade, Information With his original photographic depictions of his meeting with Tokyo, Jacob Aue Sobol once again demonstrates his great talent. The structure of the flickering, coarse grain in a black and white photograph can provoke a feeling of nostalgia in this digital age. However, one of the most talented younger Danish photographers, the 33-year-old Jacob Aue Sobol, demonstrates with his new book, the beautifully printed 'I, Tokyo', that there is no need to be altmodisch in any way towards the black and white film medium. On the contrary it can better than anything else substantiate the existential basic tones that Sobol so originally and successfully evokes in his expressive depictions of Tokyo today – the complex and slightly desperate feeling of distance and intimacy at one and the same time. In the short text that accompanies the photographs in the form of an epilogue, Sobol tells of the feeling of being 'invisible' in the crowd of people when he moved to the multi-million city of Tokyo in 2006. And about how he, with his camera, tried to overcome this feeling of anonymous disappearance by seeking out proximity to each person, the individual. As he always does, Sobol uses the camera for more, and for other things, than just creating pictures. It is used to create proximity, contact, intimacy. 'I, Tokyo' is a witness to these attempts at contact, at getting under the skin of a foreign city and of foreign people. Raw tenderness The title plays on this: the 'I' facing the city, the 'eye' facing the city. In English, 'I' and 'eye' sound the same – and perhaps in the very end they are the same thing to Sobol, the person and the perception. Anyway, across the book's 112 pages are spread more than 70 black and white photos, bleeding off the page and printed very close to each other. The visual impact fills everything up. Changing perspectives, degrees of proximity and fields of focus create an elegant, varied and at times dramatic rhythmic process throughout the book. Supplemented by subtle and playful dialogues between subjects that confront each other on the pages or send echoes through the book's pages. A beautifully conducted picture editing job by Per Folkver.
Sobol's photographs are heart-rendingly beautiful in the whole of their aggressive, brutal and raw tenderness. The first double-page spread shows us a larger-than-life Asian face, harshly lit by a source above. The face looks up at the reader, returning the reader's own look with its black pupils, that just manage to avoid being cut by the upper edge of the page. No point in the photo is in focus, the coarse grain reflects the plasticity of the face as swarms of particles, but the person nevertheless appears precisely and living. Just like the book's opening photo, this is an omen of both of the style and the content of the rest of the collection. The reader is brought face to face with people who literally and metaphorically are naked. Naked and human. Fixed in their play, passion, despair and exhaustion. In between the people appears the city: the houses, dogs, signs, elevated railway, hotel bed, the dead rat – and even the digital camera. It is a form of visual allegory, the pulse and rhythm of the city transformed into a continuous stream of pictures. Tradition Sobol's book continues a noble tradition for stringently edited photographic books about Tokyo. Not least William Klein's 'Tokyo' from 1964, which is one-fourth of his quartet of harrowing and provocative photographic essays of cities that, with a radical break from all existing photographic conventions, renewed the medium so crucially in the 1950s and 1960s. One also senses the influence of Japanese photographers like Daido Moriyama, who, with his strongly personal, diarial and almost graphic photographs in the form of books such as 'Nippon Gekijo Shashincho' from 1968, more than anyone has contributed to the image of post-war Japan as an atomised, fragmented and rootless society in all senses. But even if the presence of tradition can be sensed with Sobol, he is a photographer in his own right. The most obvious reference could very well be his earlier book, 'Sabine', which was published in 2004. 'Sabine' depicted the experiences of a stay in Greenland that lasted many years, as well of the girl who gave the book its title. This demonstrated in the same convincing fashion as 'I, Tokyo' an incontestable photographic talent, where the camera functions as an instrument for perceiving and understanding the world about us and our fellow human beings, an instrument for organising meaning in a poetic, direct and unsentimental way. It is no surprise that the most prestigious photographic cooperative group in the world, Magnum Photos, has noticed Sobol and admitted
him to their ranks. Translated from the Danish newspaper Information