Love in the Arctic Circle by Simon Bainbridge, Editor, A young Danish photographer’s debut marks the return of raw, emotional black-and-white photography, says Simon Bainbridge Sabine, Jacob Aue Sobol’s brilliant debut, is a love story set in the harsh beauty of East Greenland, but it is also about the photographer’s attempt to bridge a seemingly-impossible cultural divide. The Danish photographer first travelled to Tiniteqilaaq, a tiny fishing settlement in East Greenland, in 2000, quitting after five weeks. He returned four months later and fell in love with a wild, young Greenlander who taught him to dance and to look at life a new way. And despite some disapproval of the relationship, the villagers allowed him to integrate. ‘I’m in love. Sabine is 19 and I’m 23. I’ve decided to stay in Tiniteqilaaq. I want to be a hunter. Shoot seals and catch fish. Learn the language. I’ve stopped talking photographs,’ he writes, and over the next two years, this is exactly what he does – other than picking up his camera again. As Sobol relates in his diaristic writings in the latter half of the book, Greenlanders have a sparcity of language that contrasts with the extraneous chatter of the developed world. In one entry he recalls a seal hunting expedition with Sabine’s cousin, Vittus. The hunters set off in early-morning darkness and battle across the ice for two hours to reach open water, where the temperature plunges to -25°C, but there are no seals. Vittus utters only one sentence all day: ‘It takes a certain amount of courage to live in Greenland.’ And Sobol has buckets of it, it seems. In another entry he calmly recounts a near-death experience during one of Greenland’s feared Piteraq snow storms. For two days and nights he wanders alone, lost in the freezing wilderness, before crawling up a glacier and meeting a hunter and his dog team. ‘Where are you going?’ asks the hunter. ‘To Tiniteqilaaq,’ Sobol replies. ‘They’ve been waiting for you for a long time.’ But, as Finn Thrane (director of the Museet for Fotokunst in Denmark, which first exhibited the work) notes in his foreword, despite the friendships Sobol makes, goodwill is not enough. ‘Not even love can bridge the gap when the abyss is as bottomless as that between two cultures in disintegration and crisis.’ Back to the Beats Sabine is a throw-back to what Gerry Badger terms the ‘stream-ofconsciousness’ photobook and the Beat-inspired imagery of the 1950s and 60s. It is Love on the Left Bank transposed to East Greenland, except that where as Ed van der Elsken’s 1956 classic mixes documentary with a fictional narrative, Sabine is refreshingly candid. The style is raw, diaristic and snaphot-style, but he captures an
impressionistic account of his love affair and the ephemera of the relationship that is honest and tender – as truthful an account of love any one person can give. In his speech at the launch of the book last year, fellow Danish photographer Morton Bo referenced Scandanavia’s two best known ‘stream-of-consciousness’ photographers, Christer Strömholm and Anders Petersen, both of whom famously immersed themselves in their subjects. Until relatively recently, this kind of photography was deemed unfashionable, set against the dominant aesthetic of the new New Topography and the Yale School, with its cold analysis and staged drama. As Bo said: ‘Who's got the nerve to publish emotional black-and-white reportage? When all other photographers depict and show and watch and pursue — who's got the nerve to get involved in his subject?’ The book itself has been getting a lot of wordof-mouth since Cologne bookseller Marcus Schaden showed it at Rencontres d’Arles this summer – although it was first published and exhibited in Denmark last year. The English-language edition is limited to a run of just 200 copies, published by Sobol himself, and it was not available in the UK until British photographer Stephen Gill featured it among his recommendations at The Photographers’ Gallery bookshop earlier this year. Politiken, one of Denmark’s largest publishing houses, put out two other versions for distribution in Scandinavia, one in Danish (700 copies) and one in Greenlandic (200). In other words, not only is Sabine one of the most exciting debuts of the past couple of years, it may also prove very collectible. There’s much more to come from Sobol, who has spent the last year on a project with a Mayan family in Guatemala, and next year he will follow the Taiga people of Mongolia. He hopes to publish pictures from both series with his Greenland pictures. Watch this space.