Rock ’n’ Roll Tokyo Jacob Aue Sobol is one of the most important Danish photographers of our age and his photography is presented in an excellent way in his new book of photos from Tokyo By Johan Zimsen Kristiansen
Photo book There is something peculiarly identity-creating in the title of Jacob Aue Sobol’s new photo book, ‘I, Tokyo’. Ambiguously, the title can refer both to a fusion between the photographer Sobol and the city that is the subject in his new series of pictures, and to the photographs in the book itself: that the photographs do not just show but also are Tokyo. In addition, there is a completely different possibility: that it is in no way necessary to differentiate between Tokyo, the photographer and the photographs as all three are well and truly intertwined and impossible to separate. And one could also perhaps indicate a fourth interpretation... Jacob Aue Sobol, who was born in 1976, is today one of the most important younger Danish photographers. His pictures are taken in black and white and are often in a documentary and snap-shot style. He first drew attention to himself in 2004 with the photo series ‘Sabine’, which documented the life and sealer culture in an eastern Greenland settlement and not least his own relationship with a girl, Sabine; and again in 2006 when he followed an indigenous peasant family’s every day life in Guatemala. Finally, Sobol at the moment aspires to admission to the prestigious Magnum Photo group. With the photographs in ‘I, Tokyo’, Sobol is moving stylistically in more than one direction. The series’ subjects, which concentrate in particular on the portraits and the naked body and less on the city’s stations and streets, are grainy and coarse in their evocation. In this way, Sobol leans on Japanese photographers such as Moriyama Daido, who almost exemplarily cultivates the grainy pictorial aesthetic and odd angles, and Araki Nobuyoshi, who in his own and very direct way illustrates the naked female body. The meeting with Tokyo therefore seems not to been a short and superficial courtesy call for Sobol; rather, life in Tokyo and Japanese photography have left new, pronounced and effective traces in the development of his work. That the book’s photographs have actually been presented as well as they have been is due precisely to that combination of an eye for the intimate and aesthetic coarseness. In other words, the jump to the Japanese city has been really good for the photographic work. The somewhat nostalgic and naïve characteristics that the deserted landscapes and different social conditions previously gave Sobol’s
photographs are replaced here by a querying examination of and play with the possibilities of photography. The photographs therefore open freely in a different way to the reader; there is a little more spontaneous rock ‘n’ roll and less biography and social engagement in the Tokyo pictures. This relaxed distance to Tokyo, to the photographs’ subjects, seems paradoxically to be what makes it possible to create a more clarified and attentive, yes, almost mature and quiet intimacy in the pictures. Sobol is very successful in finding and experiencing the drama in his Tokyo photographs, not in the personal and social lopsidedness as before, but in the game between photographer, photograph and subject. In this way the photographs in ‘I, Tokyo’ also express a sort of existence modus or a way of existing, which at the same time makes it possible to understand the book’s title in a fourth way. That experience of existing, which the Tokyo photographs represent, applies not only to the relationship between the photographer, the photographs and the subjects. The experience of existing propagates from these thoroughly prepared photographs of Tokyo to the reader, the photographs gives the reader room - a not unimportant point. By making existence the identity-creating focal point of the photographs, Sobol’s photos become relevant and attentive in the encounter with the viewer; what is reader and what is photograph is suddenly without meaning; everything becomes complex and rousingly intertwined. When it comes down to it, it is only the glance that is necessary, not the many superfluous words. What’s left is this ‘I, Tokyo’.
Translated from the Danish newspaper Politiken