The young Danish photographers portrayal of Greenland is wild, beautiful and sad. By art critic Mette Sandbye, Weekend-Avisen Five years ago the young photographer Jacob Aue Sobol traveled to the small settlement Tiniteqilaaq on Greenland's rough and in every way inaccessible east coast. He wanted to make a documentary about life in the small hunter-settlement inhabited by only 158 people. After five weeks, he traveled back to Denmark, nevertheless to return four months later, because he felt that the pictures where missing something, that they were too one-sided compared with the complexity of everyday life in the settlement. He stayed for two years, because he met Sabine. She was 19, he was 23, and they fell in love. The photo book Sabine is first of all his tribute to her and, secondly, to life in the small settlement and the friends he made there. The result is a powerful, wild, restless, intense book with a powerful, wild, restless, intense young woman as its main character. On the front cover we see Sabine, who shapes a heart with her hands, and the black and white photographs of the book show her in the shower, with menstrual blood running down her leg, as an innocent child with a scarf around her head, while she lifts up her skirt so that Jacob, and we, can see her tights all in holes, while she cries, makes faces, scowls, kisses and makes love. The style is raw, grainy and sometimes out-of-focus. We get very close to the body, the skin, the details in the house that she and Jacob share. This is a form and style, known from the English snapshot photographers Richard Billingham and Corinne Day, who also fearlessly and honestly - photograph their own private life with the camera. But this is much more wild and raw, both in style and motive than Days carelessly styled London Bohemians. The book can also be looked at in continuation of Per Folkver and Frank Hvilsoms book from Greenland Of the Strength Inside from 1994, in which they portrayed the life of the youth in a bigger town on the west coast, and in which Per Folkver's refreshing raw and direct color pictures gave us, a then, unseen varied portrait of Greenland. But there is something more at stake for the young Jacob Aue Sobol, simply because he settles, begins living as a hunter, learns to speak
East Greenlandic, and all in all not only tries honestly and openly to engage himself in this totally different culture, but also puts himself a hundred percent at stake and tries to make it his. However he doesn't succeed, because after two years he travels back to Denmark without completely explaining the break up. During this time he and Sabine have actually been in Denmark twice. The book consists of two parts, one with photos and one with short texts. The shortest of them is about on of these travels, and goes like this »Sabine and I fly to Denmark. Sabine and I fly to Greenland. « How she deals with meeting his culture we never get to know, because the book is much more a precisely sensed tribute to the love they shared in Greenland, and an honest, searching, intensely present depiction of his feelings for her. The pictures of Sabine and the life they share in the tiny house are mixed with exterior photographs of fog, snow and rundown houses, a dead dog in the snow, a seal being cut up, a funeral in the settlement. The texts tell the story of a hunter's experience, deadly as well as funny, about parties and evenings in the youth club, about suicide and alcohol abuse, and how his friends taught him to hunt. It is in fact the ultra short, least descriptive or revealing texts that work best with the intense, expressive photographs. Under the title »Dead dog and chicken« it says »Tonight I stumbled over a dead dog on my way home. It didn't survive the piteraq. Sabine just got back from bingo. She won three times and her pockets are full of coins. We're having chicken for dinner.« Another place he only lists, but also explains in depth, the food they eat; »Whale skin, chicken, grouse, chocolate eggs, sea gulls, béarnaise sauce, goose and curry with dumplings. Just as many-faceted, contrasting, at once compelling and repelling as this menu – are the photographs of Jacob Aue Sobol – and the composition of them in this quivering, moving, and deeply engaged book about the woman, and the world, the meeting with her opened. Translated from The Weekend-Avisen