Very sensuous book and exhibition by Jacob Aue Sobol at Brandts in Odense By Mette Sandbye IN BOTH art and documentary photography, it has been full-colour photography that has had the upper hand in the past decade. The classical black and white form, with its paradoxical inherent proximity to reality (and reality is in colour!) and its quite special position of being steeped in notions of honesty and authenticity on the one hand and personal expressivity and depth on the other has for many younger photographers become a heavy quagmire, a cliché, that they have not been able, let alone desired, to renew. But here is one who has: Jacob Aue Sobol is his name and he has just received the prestigious Leica European Publishers Award 2008 for his new book, ‘I, Tokyo’, which is a fresh, singular and contemporary renewal of street and snapshot photography and which is an extension of older masters such as Robert Frank, William Klein (who published a photo book from Tokyo in the 1960s), the Japanese Daido Moriyama, and of Swedish masters of the close-up documentary, such as Christer Strömholm and, especially, Anders Petersen. Last year, Sobol was admitted to ‘the waiting room’ of the world’s most famous and widely recognised photographic agency, Magnum. This means that they are keeping a particularly watchful eye on him and are considering including him as a full member, but even if he does not in the end get through this needle’s eye when the two years in the waiting room are over the position is in itself an important recognition for a young photographer like Sobol, who was born in 1976. In Denmark we know him best for his photo book ‘Sabine’, which was published in 2004. Some of what has given the already mentioned photographers such as Frank, Klein, Moriyama, Petersen and a newer colour photographer such as Nan Goldin a place in photographic history is a specially delicate sense for depicting the quick sensual detail in a look or a movement, so the viewer can feel and actually see from the picture that the photographers risk something in their meeting with the people they photograph. And Sobol does that as well. If he is to depict a small sealing settlement in Greenland, as he did in ‘Sabine’, very little is won by going there for a week or two with public funding. No, Jacob Aue Sobol moved there for two years, lived as a sealer and fisherman, had an affair with Sabine and took his little snapshot camera right into the bath with her. This new project is about the diametrical opposite of the little Greenlandic settlement Tiniteqilaaq - Tokyo, where Sobol lived for a year-and-a-half from 2006. He moved there because of the work of his current, Japanese-born girlfriend, and while she was at work he roamed the city’s streets: “No-one made eye contact. I felt invisible. It was as if they did not need to communicate with others,” he says in a short postscript.
Like many westerners who go to Tokyo, he felt attracted by the city and excluded from it at the same time - or, at least, very lonely. But he nevertheless slowly came closer to the people and got to know some of the Japanese, for example by going every day to the same parks, where he got talking to young people in particular. The title, ‘I, Tokyo’, is good because it points both at the antagonism and the distance between the photographer and the city, can be regarded as a portrait of the city, and finally as a self-portrait of the photographer and his own moods. The stile is coarsely grained, rich in contrasts and very, very close - to naked bodies, rubbish, a dead rat, a child’s bawling mouth. Many photo books have been published from and about Tokyo in recent years, but never have we been so close to it and the city has rarely been depicted as so brutal. We are far from the futuristic architecture and ‘kawai’-cute, erotic Manga girls. Material around scaffolding has two black circles or holes that make it resemble a ghost, we get into alleys with their dark confusion of cables and pipes as if they were the road to Hades, a little girl’s teeth are exposed as a guinea pig crawls into her lap. A girl with a half-eaten plate of noodles lifts up her skirt to expose her naked sexual organs, and, as a whole, Sobol has been right into both the bedroom and the bathroom with the naked bodies that are depicted with great expressivity and sensuality compared with the exclusiveness and emotional as well as physical distance people from the outside experience with the Japanese. One reason for the writer Murakami’s great success in the West at the moment is probably that he more than anyone has depicted a form of liberated, erotic and at the same time very ordinary sensuality among young Japanese in particular, which a western public has surprisingly been able to reflect itself in. Sobol has also been inspired by Murakami, he said once. You get a physical feeling of skin and hair when you leaf through the book: scratches on the back, an old, wrinkled man scratching his puckered-parchment stomach, a bald head covered in black spots, a male nipple with long black hairs that twist like filigrees on white skin. The exhibition amplifies this impression with very large copies that - hung in series and close together - do not follow the book’s composition but are arranged more according to subject and place greater weight on the portraits of bodies and faces. Sloping walls have been placed in the large exhibition hall so one feels surrounded by and almost swallowed up by the pictures, no matter where one moves between them. In the book the pictures are printed bleeding off the page, but common for both the book’s and the exhibition’s pictures is the consistently beautiful graphic print. The gigantic baby bounder with child has been photographed as a black silhouette and resembles a torture instrument, as does the merry-go-round with the somewhat frightened child. There are bums in the street and businessmen stealing five minutes exhausted sleep on a flight of stairs. But it is not exclusively a black, lonely and scary Tokyo that Sobol depicts. One sees, smells, feels, hears, kisses Tokyo, the photographer and the people he has met. One gets very close to a large number of anonymous and especially young people and their more or less naked bodies. One
doesn’t get to know them, but one can see the book and the exhibition as a very peculiar, metaphorically sensuous interpretation - at the same time attractive and repulsive - of the city of Tokyo. Although the world of subjects in ‘Sabine’ was at first glance the complete opposite of that in ‘I, Tokyo’, the two books actually resemble each other. Sobol’s impertinently brutal and physical way of photographing is quite his own - and will function as a vital injection of energy in the tradition-bound bastion of Magnum.
Translated from the Danish newspaper Weekend-Avisen