Love in a freezing cold climate by Sean O'Hagan, Sunday May 28, 2006, Observer Taking pictures was the only thing on Jacob Aue Sobol's mind when he set off for the icy wastes of Greenland. Then he met local Inuit Sabine ... When he was a young boy, Jacob Aue Sobol read The Diary of a Hunter by Thomas Thuma, a book about the often extraordinary rigours of everyday life in east Greenland. 'It was so straightforward and yet so dramatic,' he remembers. 'It showed the day‐to‐day existence of an Inuit hunter but that simple life, in itself, was enough. It contained more drama than any novel I had read.' One could say the same of Sobol's first book of photographs, Sabine. In one powerful image after another, it records his two years spent living among the Inuit of east Greenland, hunting polar bears and seals, fishing for trout and salmon and falling in love with the girl of the title. Their intense relationship echoes the intensity of everyday life in the small commuity of Tineteqilaaq, as well as the stark beauty of one of the harshest places on earth. Sabine, though, is essentially a love story, intimate and revealing, and, at its centre, is a young girl whose face seems to hold all the beauty and sadness of her people. 'I keep looking for another word to describe my relationship with Sabine, but intense is really the only word,' says Sobol, who is passing through his native Copenhagen en route to Liverpool for a show of his Sabine pictures at the Open Eye gallery. 'But everything about the place was intense. Or, at least, it appeared so to an outsider like me. When Sabine saw the book, she did not think the images were intense at all, though. She just said, "That's the way it is." ' Sobol initially travelled to east Greenland on a government grant having studied photography at the Danish School of Art Photography, whose guiding spirit was the late, great Scandinavian photographer, Christer Stromholm. Stromholm believed that photography was a way to illuminate the life of the marginalised and the outsider and to confront the essential mysteries of life and death. His ideas have made him one of the founding fathers of modern European photography and perhaps his most famous student is Anders Petersen, whose classic book, Cafe Lehmitz, details the life of the prostitutes, pimps and transvestites of Hamburg's red‐light district 'Anders Petersen showed me that photography is a way of life in itself,' says Sobol. 'The way he immerses himself in his subject. You look at his pictures and you feel that he had to make them. For him, photography is an obsession as well as an art form.' The same could be said of Sobol's work, though his first attempts to capture the lives of the Inuit were, he says, a dismal failure. 'I was ambitious and driven, but that meant nothing there,' he laughs. 'After a while, I realised I was only meeting the outsiders and outcasts in the community. They were drawn to this strange foreign guy with a camera, but no one else was even remotely interested. I was a distraction, an intruder.' Sobol returned to Copenhagen in 1999 with hundreds of images but a sense of failure that, for a time, made him question his ability as a photographer. Tiniteqilaaq continued to exert a hold
on his imagination, though, and he returned there in the spring of 2000, moving in with Hans, the local priest, and his family. Then an unexpected thing happened. He fell in love with Hans's cousin. Her full name was Sabine Nikoline Andersine Nina Ebba Maque and she was the table tennis champion at the local youth club. He was 23, she 19. The night they fell in love, he wrote in his diary: 'I've decided to stay in Tineteqilaaq. I want to be a hunter. Shoot seals and catch fish. Learn the language. I've stopped taking photographs.' For four months, he did not take a single photograph. 'Something changed inside me and I got so much into hunting, shooting and fishing for trout and salmon. I realised that it was more important for me to come home with food than photographs. When I picked up the camera again, I was part of the community.' Sobol lived as a hunter among the Inuit for two years, cut off from the outside world. 'This is where life has been hiding,' he wrote, as if finding his true self for the first time. He lived on seal meat and blubber, polar bear, guillemot, rockfish and seaweed and sometimes Danish salami and Danish pastries. When he killed a seal, he feasted with the other hunters on its raw liver. If he wanted entertainment, there was bingo or table tennis in the community hall. Mostly, though, life was tough, a matter of survival. He attended the funerals of three local men who died by their own hands in the dark, cruel months of a Greenland winter. Once, he almost died of exposure in the night when he lost his bearings during a piteraq, an ice storm that sweeps across east Greenland without warning. From time to time, he wondered what he was doing there. Always the answer was: Sabine. The history of modern photography is punctuated by the publication of certain books whose narratives are so intimate and dramatic that they initially seem shocking, even intrusive ‐ Larry Clark's drug diary, Tulsa, for example, or Richard Billingham's astonishing images of his gloriously dysfunctional family, Ray's a Laugh. And now Sabine, whose images put you right into their relationship, taking you on their intense, doomed journey. The photographic narrative is enhanced by Sobol's pared‐down but powerful prose (much of which is included inthe show), a kind of fragmented diary of his time in Tinteqilaaq. 'Tonight, I stumbled over a dead dog on my way home,' he writes at one point. 'It didn't survive the piteraq. Sabine just got back from the bingo. She won three times and her pockets are full of coins.' In the end, though, the differences between them began to outweigh their love for each other. 'I could not live forever in east Greenland and Sabine could not adjust to city life in Copenhagen,' says Sobol, quietly. 'It was just very sad. Even now, selecting the images for this show, I felt an ache in my stomach.' When he returned to Copenhagen from Tinteqilaaq, and left Sabine behind, he was, he says, 'totally lost'. Months passed in which he hardly took a picture, but spent a lot of time staring at the brick wall outside his apartment window. 'It took me a long time to find my way again.I think putting the book together was initially just another way of holding on to Sabine and the life I had left behind.' Now Sobol is living and working in Tokyo, immersed in another project that, he says, 'will reveal itself to me as I take pictures'. He has applied for a grant to complete another photographic narrative in Guatemala. Sabine, he says, has just given birth to a baby and is
living happily 'at home' in east Greenland. As he speaks, and as you look at his wonderful pictures, you feel that it was his home, too, if only for a short time. And maybe, in some way, forever.