Interview with Jacob Aue Sobol by Monica Nunez, Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool. -Sabine started off as a project that still didn’t have a name, a documentary trip to Greenland. This was your first photography project. What was your mindset about it? (Why Greenland? How did the project start? Was their any aspect of Inuit life that attracted you in particular or that prompted you to do the project? Did you seek inspiration in documentary work by other photographers/anthropologists/…? What kind of photography were you doing at the time? Did you have any ideas of how you would work, what you would find, what you were aiming at as a documentary photographer?) When I was still attending high school my father, who was a journalist, tragically died in a car accident. A few weeks before he had given me a book written by his Greenlandic friend Tuma called The Diary of a Hunter to help me with a paper I was doing about the consequences of the modernization in Greenland. I was drawn by the simple beauty of this book. The straightforward drawings and minimalistic words telling about weather, hunting and the small things that indicated a rapidly changing society. The book was completely without any showing off or dramatic staging. It was obvious that the story of the inuits was large enough in itself. In the following years taking courses at the European Film College and Fatamorgana The Danish School of Art Photography, this book remained in my consciousness as a everyday life story from a place, my mind was determined to experience. During my first months of photographing at Fatamorgana the works of Lars Tunbjörk and Martin Parr mostly fascinated me. My ambition was to show my emotions through repulsive, open sandwiches and obscure situations from amusement parks. But my lack of interest in spending time at these places turned me more and more towards the people, who were close to me. I started photographing my girlfriend, friends and family and mainly looked for inspiration from Nan Goldin or Richard Billingham. Like Goldin I feel that snapshot photography is the form of photography that is closest related to our emotions - pictures we take of people we care about and moments we want to remember. But my strongest source of inspiration comes from the intimate and intense photographs of Anders Petersen whose work leave you with the sense that there is a difference between photographing to describe and remember, and photographing out of a necessity or even to survive. Finally in the fall of 1999 I was able to travel to Greenland with a grant from the Danish Art Foundation. My idea was to catch this strange connection that exists in Greenland between the original way of living and a more modern society. Had the clash between cultures resulted in conflict or interdependence? Also, in Greenland, I wanted to get close to a small group of people to see if I through everyday situations could make my photographs deal with more basic existential conditions in any human being.
-You arrived in Tiniteqilaaq, a hunter settlement in the East Coast inhabited by only 158 people. What were your most immediate impressions? (And how did you respond to them?) In the beginning only few people seemed interested in communicating with me. I was offered an empty house with no heating. After three days the owner of the house certainly showed up in the middle of the night with blood poring from a hole in his head, which was the result of a fight with his cousin. Otto was my first host and my first friend. In general I was met with a mixture of prejudices, hospitality and curiosity - as you would expect any society to welcome a stranger. But soon I found out that the people, who were eager to get in contact with me, were the outcast or the people in need. It was not the well-functioning Inuit-family. Why would they be interested in me? And I realized, that if I did not get to know the mainstay of the population, my story would become the cliché of a beautiful Greenland destroyed by alcohol and western life style. Of course, reality is not as simple as that. Many of the Inuits seem to live with a constructive combination of traditions and modern means such as the riffle and the vhfradio. And even though Otto remained a friend through out my stay in Greenland, it was my meeting with the priest and the hunter Hans that made the first change. -After five weeks you flied to Denmark. You returned four months later, this time to stay. (How did the urge to go back emerge?) Hans was one of the reasons for my return. On the last days of my first stay I started to go hunting with him, and he invited me to come live with his family. He didn’t speak much Danish, so he started teaching me Greenlandic. He taught me about the ice, the hunting methods and the mentality of the Inuits. In those last days with Hans I got to understand that I knew so little about these people, and that my first five weeks had only been the beginning. At the same time my pictures from the first trip were a disaster. I felt that my portrait of the village was distorted. That the small society had far more lawyers or meanings than my photographs were communicating. I was disappointed and felt determined to return and get closer to tell a more complex story, which would not simplify the life of the Inuits. -You met Sabine and started a life as a hunter. You fell in love with her. You stopped taking photographs. When you picked up your camera again it was more of simple, everyday object. Your photographs recorded a spontaneous look at reality, both fascinated and fearless. How did the project evolve from here? (How did your new life and the intimacy shared with Sabine change your way of looking at things? I see such amazing contrasts of light and emotions in your book, shifting prospectives, grainy exposures… Could you expand on that?) There was no project any more. Or rather no photographic project. Now it was all about me making a living with Sabine. Learning to communicate, hunt, repair the nets or clean the fur - everyday life. People stopped asking me why I was in Tiniteqilaaq. Instead they asked where I had gone hunting that day and what I had caught. In Sabine’s family no
one cared if I came home with two exposed films, but if I had caught trout or shot a seal everybody was happy. It became a status symbol for me to come home with the prey like the rest of the men in the settlement. When I picked up the camera again, I was no longer photographing to be daring. I did no longer wait for the right moment to appear or an extreme situation to dramatize my story. I photographed to record some of the moments and emotions I shared with Sabine and that I wanted to remember and keep with me. Sabine blowing me a kiss, Sabine laughing, Sabine jealous, Sabine sleeping. I did not watch through the camera as Sabine took a bath – I joined Sabine with the camera. The pictures were evolving from showing to being. I did no longer feel like a stranger documenting the life of the Inuits, but the documentary rather developed into a self-biography about my meeting with a foreign place and Sabine. -Back in Denmark you dedicated the project to Sabine and published it as a book. Sabine is at once art, documentary and biography. Did you ever feel the need to position yourself within these lines? (Sabine is certainly not a classic documentary work… How did you feel about publishing such an intimate body of work? And how do you feel today seeing it presented as an exhibition? How has this whole experience informed your attitude as a photographer? How did other professionals and the public respond to the book?) I had no specific plans for the material I was recording. It was not before my return to Denmark that I developed my films from the last 6 months in Greenland. The following year I went through all the contact sheets documenting my life with Sabine during more than two and a half year. Writing the stories and editing the book was a way for me to stay with Sabine and Greenland. In the beginning I thought that I was documenting a story of life in the settlement. But in the end it had to be Sabine. Sabine is Greenland. I know that the project started out as a documentary, and I still very much think it is. Though it has been important for me to develop my own visual language to make my projects even more personal. I very much feel present in my own pictures partly because of this. I want to recognize myself in my work, but at the same time I want to tell stories that I believe are important to other people as well. It doesn’t matter to me if you call it art, documentary or biography. I believe that the true impression of a photograph goes beyond that, and of course in this state it is no longer important if a picture is sharp or well exposed, but rather if you feel something, when you look at it. I had my shaky moments around the time of the publications. When that happened I called Sabine to discuss the consequences. I send her the dummy of the book. I wanted Sabine to see it first. Her impression was crucial to me, because the book was ment as a tribute to her and Greenland. Sabine laughed and she cried. She was proud and she was embarrassed. She trusted me. When I look at the exhibition today, I am both proud and tense. It’s easy to work with real personal pictures at home on the floor, but putting them out in a public space certainly makes you feel that you invite everyone to look inside you. Part of me wants to exhibit Sabine, because I know the complexity and potential of my work, but at the same time each exhibition is very emotional for me to put up. I very much still feel, hear and see Sabine everywhere around me.
In Denmark I got 12 great reviews from art critics, debaters and photographers. In Greenland there was a review in each of the national newspapers. One indicated that I with the book Sabine had destroyed her life by publishing her privacy, while the other claimed that it was an unusual and beautiful book about Tiniteqilaaq in general and Sabine in particular. In any case the book is a love story between a Danish man and a Greenlandic woman. And though it is a common relation, it is still covered by tabooes and prejudices in both countries. Having done this personal work in the beginning of my career has left me with two options. To quit photographing or to continue to seek closer. The year after Sabine was published, I wanted to quit. I never really felt that it was part of my identity to be a photographer, and I felt that Sabine was all that I could ever express. I had nothing more to tell, which could be as important as Sabine. Though after letting go of all my ambitions I slowly started photographing again, and in 2005 I went to Guatemala to do a new documentary. Today I very much feel dependent on my photography. I realize that my feelings can be expressed in other places than Greenland and through other people than Sabine. And I know that my pictures can bring me somewhere, I am always longing to go. -In the light of the experience lived through Sabine, would you like to comment on your recent projects? (Guatemala feels a lot different‌) When I first went to Guatemala it was to do a documentary film with my brother about a young Mayan girls first journey to the ocean. It was two years since I came home from Greenland, and it was the first time I worked visually since my return. My brother who had worked in Guatemala before introduced me to a culture, which caught my interest in a different way than Greenland. In Tiniteqilaaq the people had always been hunters – killing every day. In Guatemala the natives live from cultivating the land. The difference of mentality is obvious, and I think you sense that in my work. Where as my photographs from Greenland obviously express both the intensity and calmness of the hunting culture, my Guatemala pictures seem to have a more meditative character. At the same time I realize that the epoch-making, unpredictable and playful images in Sabine was something I could only achieve by not aiming at it. Whereas Guatemala is the result of working more result-orientated on a defined project. It will always be important for me to have a relation to the people I photograph. I tried to aim for this in Guatemala again by living for a long period with a family and studying Spanish to be able to communicate with them. I spend time working with the men and the boys on their land and with the women and the girls in the house. Not before there was a mutual trust, I was able to do the photographs that contained the intimacy and closeness that has become important to me. Now living in Tokyo, I think my way of working will be the same. It is scary that you can feel lonelier in a city of 15 million people compared to a settlement of 150. I am starting to learn Japanese and slowly, I am starting to photograph. It has always been like that, and I am confident that - as I will build up relations in Tokyo, my pictures will grow as well.