INTRO: Jacob Aue Sobol’s intensely personal and expressive black-and-white photography is rapidly earning him a reputation as one of the rising stars in photography. In 1999, when he was twenty three, he travelled to east Greenland where he lived in the small settlement Tiniteqilaaq for three years with his Greenlandic girlfriend Sabine. The photographs from this time resulted in his well-received debut book, Sabine for which he was nominated for the Deutche Börse Photography Prize 200. He has exhibited widely in his native Denmark as well as abroad and became a nominee at Magnum Photos last year. His latest body of work I, Tokyo, for which he received the prestigious 2008 Leica European Publishers’ Award, is his first solo exhibition at the Museet for Fotokunst. The following email interview took place in the lead up to the opening of the I, Tokyo exhibition and launch of the book. Miranda Gavin Who curated the exhibition I Tokyo and have you been involved in the process? The exhibition is curated by the director of the Museet for Fotokunst, Ingrid Fischer Jonge, who saw the project last year and immediately offered me an exhibition. Ingrid and I have discussed the selection and size of the 65-70 prints. It’s a very personal matter - so many different stories can be told depending on how you put the work together. Despite this, I do listen to what other people have to say, especially the people who are close to me since they have a stronger feeling of what Jacob looks like. Your mother and her partner are both photographers. What kind of work do they do and how has their influence shaped your photographic career? My mother was a press photographer for the Danish tabloid-magazine, BilledBladet. She was one of the best in her field but retired a few years ago. When I went to Fatamorgana, the Danish School of Documentary and Art Photography, in 1998, I think she imagined me becoming a photojournalist as well, but as my photography changed, she supported my branching out in a different direction. Her partner Torben Stroyer is also a photographer for the daily newspaper, Jyllands-Posten. They both play a big role in the editing of my work. My mother usually helps me in the first stage of the process which involves looking through thousands of images. Later, Torben helps with the final selections for the book and exhibition. I prefer working with people that are close to me, because they have a better feeling of who I am. When did your father die and how did this impact on your work and what you decided to do with your life? My father was killed in a car accident in 1996. At the time I was in my last year of high school and was about to take my final exams and decide on my further education. Of course it was a shock to my mother, brother, sister and I. It was a traumatized period which was filled with darkness and fear. I think it added
another layer to my life which I had to do something about. Not only as something painful but more as a place with a certain depth that was different from that of normal life. The year after I started at the European Film College, I started writing short stories and, later, taking pictures. Once I realized that I was able to isolate my emotions and communicate them through my pictures, I felt like I had found an ability which was unique and which I wanted to explore further. Now, a lot of experiences in life and the people I have shared my time with have added to my memories, my fear and my love, and through this they have inspired me to continue photographing. You used to develop black and white film in your parent’s bathroom. Do you still do this? Most of my films from Greenland and some from Tokyo were developed in my mother’s darkroom but last year I started to work with a lab in Tokyo to save time. But it is never the same result as when you do it yourself. I would rather spend my time producing new work, so I have to compromise a bit with the quality of the developing. There is a huge contrast between Tiniteqilaaq and Tokyo, especially in terms of the environment, yet in both bodies of work there is a sense of trying to overcome isolation and loneliness. Do you often feel like an outsider and how does this affect your work? Tokyo and Tiniteqilaaq are probably as different as you can get. In Tiniteqilaaq, you live, eat, sleep, love, laugh and cry with the same 150 people every day. This kind of closeness becomes unique since you are forced to share everything. When a young man shoots himself with his father’s rifle, it is not only the parents who grieve, it has a profound effect on the whole settlement. When a hunter shoots a polar bear or a whale, it is not only a celebration for the hunter and his family, but for the whole settlement. Once I had adapted to Tiniteqilaaq, once I had shot my first seal and eaten its warm, raw liver with the other hunters, I no longer felt isolated because I came home with prey instead of two rolls of exposed films. People stopped asking me why I was in Tiniteqilaaq and instead asked where I had been hunting that day and what I had caught. As long as Sabine and I were together, Tiniteqilaaq was my home and I did not feel isolated. Tokyo is very different because the intimate situation of being isolated with a group of people doesn’t exist. There are crowds of people but if you are not part of the daily routine, your isolation becomes obvious. Initially, I felt invisible. Every day I would walk the streets without anyone making eye-contact with me. Everyone seemed to be heading somewhere – it was if they had no need to communicate. My feeling of loneliness and isolation was overwhelming and it was something I had to find a way to change. When I walked the streets I felt lonely and fragile, but it was also a feeling I wanted to change and it made me search for people I could relate to.
Though I am a shy and inhibited person among strangers, I do not wish to be an outsider. I am a social human being and my photography is a social gesture; I am reaching my hand out to the surrounding world and the people I meet. So I started bringing my pocket cameras with me so that I could meet the people, get involved in the city and make Tokyo mine. I don't know if I succeeded in breaking the isolation but I started to communicate. I started meeting people on a one-toone basis, which, I feel, gave me a better understanding of what it means to be part of a city like Tokyo. Both of your projects cover a period of time between 18 months to two years. Do you like to work slowly and over a long period of time? It is not really planned, but is more a result of the fact that the more time I spend in a place, the more complex it gets, and the more time I need to try to understand what it is I am searching for. At first every street in Tokyo was new to me but the feeling of certain areas kept capturing my interest, so I kept returning to these places to know more and to meet the people who came there. I am not that different from many other photographers. To begin with you photograph all the things that are strange and make you feel different, however, soon you start looking for connections. Time is crucial to me. You can’t be in a hurry if you want to show a deep interest in a foreign culture and its people. You say that you use “pocket cameras”. Which ones do you use and have you always used them? I use Contax T3 and G2 analogue cameras and, sometimes, a Ricoh GRs1. Before working with the smaller Contax cameras, I used a Canon-Eos, which was a typical camera for a photojournalist at that time. It appears that your work is inextricably linked to your love life and relationships. You stay in East Greenland because of falling in love with Sabine and live in Tokyo because of your current girlfriend Sara getting a job there. Is your personal work always an exploration of your personal life? I do find it difficult to work in places I am not connected to in some way. I simply lose interest in the place, because I don’t have a close relation, which allows me to approach the place in a more personal way. In Greenland, I started photographing Sabine because I was in love with her, but in Tokyo the situation was different because Sara worked long hours and I was left on my own to explore the city. In this way, my love for Sara and the emotions we shared in our relationship mostly appeared in my images from the streets and in my meetings with strangers. In both Sabine and I, Tokyo you have written personal texts. How important is it to have your ‘voice’ in the texts and why? It is important for me to write text when I feel I have something to say that the pictures do not show. I started writing text for the Sabine book because I felt the pictures could not say everything. My pictures are very emotional and never deal
with something tangible. Writing the text was a way for me to pay more attention to the details of everyday life, those small things that illustrate the huge impact Sabine and Tiniteqilaaq had on me. Also, I wanted people to feel that Sabine was not just an object in front of the camera but that we also shared many things, apart from our emotional life. It was a tribute to her. When she first read the text she cried because there were too many memories. I wanted to tell her how much all these experiences had meant to me, therefore I also made sure that the book was published in Greenlandic (also known as Kalaallisut). With the Tokyo work I felt different. I did not feel the daily stories of me wandering around the streets and meeting people were interesting. The pictures appeared stronger and told how I felt that day – my experience of the city. So I decided to only write a short text about my motivations in photography and the way I work. In the introduction to I, Tokyo, you refer to the city as both “attractive and hideous”. Could you explain what you mean by this? The tight and confined reality of the metropolis was obviously a huge contrast to the wide and open nature of Greenland and its people. I don't really know how to describe the feeling of my first meeting with Tokyo, except that it was like a bombardment of new impressions which left me curious and feeling distant at the same time. The narrow streets, a language without meaning, empty graphic signs, sounds without content, and the eternal swarm of people mixing without communicating. A place where you are not looked at and you don’t look at anyone; a city where everything seems to function but you still feel that something is wrong, that something is hidden or untold. I felt isolated and ignored yet my curiosity was triggered and I wanted to know more. Did you work with a designer on the book I, Tokyo? No, Dewi Lewis Publishing designed the book but I worked on the layout of the images with Per Folkver, who is picture editor in chief of the Danish newspaper Politiken. He knows me quite well and has a unique talent of putting pictures together. I guess his strength is not only to create strong sequences, but he is also able to put himself in my place, to familiarize himself with my vision. In my life, I have only met a few editors with that ability since most of them tend to create their own story with the given material. You oversaw the printing in Italy. What did this involve? For every sheet we print, I have to check if the images look the way I want them to and can then make minor corrections by adding or subtracting the pantone or the blacks. We are printing triotone, which means there are two blacks and one grey to adjust. It can be very frustrating since it will never look exactly as you expect. I spent two days in my hotel room in Verona looking at the prints and thinking that they looked awful, though now I realize they look fine. Finishing something that I have worked on for years and publishing it as a book is a very emotional experience for me, and I think that’s why I panicked. It will be strange
to see my personal pictures, which I have only looked at in the privacy of my home, being printed in thousands of copies and sold around the world. Can you tell me more about your personal and photographic journey and progression from Sabine to I, Tokyo? Firstly, how important are the titles to your work? Secondly, could you tell me about how you see the similarities and differences in these two bodies of work? It is important to think everything through, so in the end you feel this is how you wanted the book or exhibition to be. At the same time, when the project is published it as also an anti climax, because there will always be something you regret - something you could have done better or different. With Sabine the working title, at first, was Tiniteqilaaq – the strait that runs dry at low tide. At this time I still thought I was making a book about the settlement. But looking through all my contact sheets and editing my material from two years, Sabine started taking over the story. In the end, the pictures chose themselves. To me, Sabine is Greenland, so the title became her name. With the Tokyo work, I was looking for a title that would communicate how the work is a personal portrait of the city. I, Tokyo can mean that this is Tokyo speaking - or it can mean I and Tokyo, which refers to the intimate relation between me and the city and my personal experience. When I started using the pocket camera in Greenland my approach as a photographer changed from a more journalistic point of view to that of someone recording memories and trying to ignore my identity as a photographer. I have tried to keep my diary-like approach from Greenland in the Tokyo work by using my pocket camera, though now I am no longer photographing my loved one but people I meet in the city. Still, it is the intimate relation with the city or the people that I meet that is my motivation. Photography is an incredibly tough and competitive business and financing projects, especially personal ones, is often difficult for photographers. How do you finance your work? Grants have financed all my work in Greenland as well as in Tokyo. Private funds have continuously supported my work and the Danish Arts Agency, from whom I received a grant this year, has also helped over the last five to six years. In that sense I am very spoiled. It allows me the time and space to do my own work. Do you take on commercial photographic assignments? I have only done a few jobs with my brother, who is a journalist, but that is more because I enjoy working with him. Commercial work doesn't interest me. Both projects are shot in black and white. Do you produce any work in colour or do you have any plans to work in colour? Every time I start a new project, I use colour film because I think it is time to renew myself but I always end up returning to black and white. My colour pictures can be beautiful, ugly and interesting, perhaps, but I can’t feel them. I can’t find
myself, and they become completely meaningless to me. They are like decorations. In the end, I don't really think there is any choice for me. “I believe it is when pictures are unconsidered and irrational that they come to life; that they evolve from showing to being”, you write in the introduction to I, Tokyo. Why is this so important to you and does this mean that you see yourself as working in a more expressionistic way? Also, are you consciously working in opposition to formal aesthetics, for example, to carefully constructed imagery and the aesthetics favoured by some of the leading photographers from the Dusseldorf school of photography? My choice of working in a more irrational way has not much to do with trying to be in opposition to anything. I am unable to make any conscious choices concerning my photography. Every image I take is a picture of how I feel that day – my experience of a place or a meeting with another person. I am not trying to prove anything but simply to be myself. At the start of my stay in Greenland, I worked in a more rational way and tried to think of images that included the information needed for a story about life in the settlement. But falling in love with Sabine changed that. She was irrational; she taught me how to see and how to go to the limit. After a long period of not photographing in Greenland, I picked up the camera again when Sabine was dancing around the house revealing her torn, star-patterned panties. I suddenly felt like photographing again because it was a moment I wanted to remember and keep with me. After this, I continued using my pocket camera, which I could carry around without feeling that my main purpose of being there was to take pictures. I did not feel like a photographer but more like someone who wished to keep a diary, to record some of the moments and emotions I shared with Sabine; Sabine blowing me a kiss, Sabine laughing, Sabine being jealous and Sabine sleeping. I didn’t look through the camera as Sabine took a bath - I joined Sabine with the camera. This was when the pictures were evolving from showing to being. It was as if I was no longer a stranger documenting the life of the Inuits but rather the documentary evolved into an autobiography about my life with Sabine. Later, working in Tokyo, Copenhagen and other places, I’ve tried to keep the aesthetics of the snapshot and the irrational way of working, simply because I feel the link between our inner lives and the images I create become stronger in this way. And yes, life is expressionistic, isn't it? People cry, laugh, scream, vomit and make love. That is the reality I want to approach with my camera. You photographed Sabine menstruating in the shower and wrote about the shit bucket. On the cover of I, Tokyo, you show what look like scratches on someone’s back. Are you exploring the body and its functions in your work? When I was living in Greenland I was to a large extent unconscious of the work I was creating. I photographed Sabine menstruating in the shower because I was
in love with her and it was a part of our everyday life, and as natural as eating or emptying the shit bucket. In my Tokyo work, my desire to unfold a private universe and involve the viewer in other peoples’ inner lives has been a continuous ambition. My interest in the intimate, the fragile and the exposed human being is obvious but is more a simple wish to photograph life as it is lived and the body as it is perceived by my senses. There are similarities in your work and approach to that of Anders Peterson and Daido Moriyami. Is this a conscious choice and what do you think of their work? As I mentioned before, I do not feel that I am making any conscious choices about my photography. I like the work of both Anders Petersen and Daido Moriyama. They are in different ways able to grasp reality as a battle of emotions and flux. Is photography cathartic for you as it offers a way of working through your emotions and experiences? Has it always? Yes, every image I create is a picture of how I feel that day - my experience of a place. It has become my ability to isolate my emotions and communicate them through the camera and into the mind of the viewer. I think the way my documentary project in Greenland turned into an autobiography has had a lot of influence on how I work today. From the beginning, I got used to this close connection between my emotional life and my pictures. In this way, my aim has always been to reach layers in people, which are not immediately visible, but nonetheless shape who we are and add substance to our lives. But I also photograph because I am curious. I am curious about what the person on the other side of the street is thinking, how he or she lives, and how he or she feels. I am always looking for someone to share a moment with. You initially studied film, so what prompted your decision to move from moving image to still image when you went to the Danish School of Art Photography? The first time I started looking at photography was when I was a student at the European Film College, Denmark in 1998. I wanted to be a cinematographer but I didn't get the class so I started a course in photography. I did so well that many of the production teams wanted me to do the stills for their movies. Later, I also got the chance to direct some short films myself, but even though the vision was mine, I found the process of filmmaking too comprehensive, with too many compromises. With photography, I could be my own scriptwriter, director, photographer and editor. The line I discovered between my inner life and the images I created fascinated me - I was able to isolate an emotion and communicate this emotion to other people. I found it much more instinctual than making films, especially ‘snapshot photography’ which is a form of expression that is closely related to our emotions - pictures we take of people we care about and moments we want to keep. That’s
why I try to use my pocket cameras as much as possible; they support the feeling of something unpredictable and playful. Do you still work in moving image and do you any plans to make more films? I do hope that I will feel inspired in this field at a later time of my career, but I still feel that there are so many challenges for me within photography. Not because I want to change the way I work but instead of moving into a different field, I feel like I am working in greater depth now. I am still searching and I am unable to make any strategic decisions about which direction my work should follow. I have to keep on taking pictures and see if my vision changes and how my work develops. ENDS