Who’s got the nerve? Speech made at the publication of the book and the opening of the exhibition Sabine at Frederiks Bastion, Copenhagen, February 27, 2004. By Morten Bo Who's got the nerve? Who's got the nerve in a time when documentary photography has outgrown its black frame and spread to the colored screen, staggering between digital snapshot and arranged concept photography — 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? When Christer Strömholm in the late fifties moved in with transvestites on the Place Blanche, he gambled his reputation and his privacy to get inside, all the way in, where it hurts. In where it's almost embarrassing. Sincere intimacy — who's got the nerve for that today? Showing tenderness and honesty at the expense of the striking and impressive, publishing a continuation of Anders Petersen's “Café Lehmitz” 40 years after it sold out — who's got the nerve to do that? The risk of failure is too great. Literature has its milestones of significant, personal life stories, diary pages of self-experienced passion. So does music. Film is getting there. But what about photography? Who's got the nerve to photograph his or her own experiences with love? Steamy rawness, wonderful pain? Do it with honesty and intimacy, and you risk being called perverted and self-involved. Autobiographical confessional photography, when you are in love, takes courage. It's not considered good form to hang out your dirty laundry after a night of passion. Photographing love's innermost nature, all the way in, where it hurts, takes more than ordinary humility. Who's got the nerve to venture into the wasteland, with a forecast for storm, or into love, with a forecast for betrayal and grief, risking your life in a piteraq or testing your conscience in a relationship? For the rest of us to learn. We need to know this, we know so little about ourselves. And each other. And what's worse, we don't know at all. We carefully make sure to drape a towel over our shoulders when we have our hair cut at home, to avoid nasty, prickly hairs that itch and bug for days. We don't know that desire grows when hair ends lie like driven snow on our bare back. We have no idea. We don't know that torn pantyhose can be stirringly beautiful, not because it's a pretty sight, but because it's intimacy.
When your lover lifts her dress, revealing her worn-out pants, it's deep trust. We have no idea that life can be so intimate and intense. We don't know that death can be beautiful and a matter of course, that your feelings for a butchered seal on the kitchen floor or for your lover's hot lap are identical. We have no idea. That nature isn't something we ramble around in, but something we are. Who's got the nerve? Does Jacob Aue Sobol? No, but he acts. Had he known what he was doing, he never would have dared to. Then he never would have gone hunting without mittens, never would have flashed his camera under the covers. When, after a start of fervent photography, he realizes he is doing it to be daring, because he's got the nerve and not because it's necessary, he puts his camera on the mantelpiece and refuses to take another picture. Not until he has shot a seal out on the ice and eaten its liver raw and warm — not to be daring, but to survive — does he take his camera back down again. Burn blisters on his face makes his daring secondary. What's important is not that he's got the nerve, but whether he makes it. The game is real and he starts taking pictures. Not to describe, but to survive. He does not watch through his camera as Sabine takes a bath, he joins Sabine with the camera. The pictures evolve from showing to being. As though they are out for survival more than showing courage. That is their strength. They are not trash-flash-snapshot-realism-documentary on purpose. They are so out of need. That makes the pictures special, that they were made out of necessity. Flipping through the book is like staggering across wet ice in the rain, always probing with the pike to see if it will hold. You don't do it to get to know something. You do it to survive. When you reach the top of the railing at a second-floor height and fearlessly plunge into the void without thought of the consequences, the book rises out of day-to-day security and something magical happens — it is us Sabine is kissing. The book lives when the pictures are thoughtless and irrational. Forgive the blasé city dweller for finding it naïve and insignificant. Dear Jacob, today you set the pictures free. Now they must manage on their own. You can no longer control or coddle them. They turned out the way they did, because it couldn't be any other way. No icebergs, no kayaks, no empty bottles. No pity or anthropological studies. The picture of you in a blue full body suit wasn't necessary. Have no doubt that your book was made out of necessity. If you lose faith, regret hits you like a rifle shot. Then you have exploited the sealers, betrayed your friends, lied to yourself, cheated on your lover and your only resort is visiting every bookseller and buying up and destroying every copy of your book before they are sold. Have no doubt, you have reason to be proud. Thank you. With your book, on the threshold to a new age, you have given documentary
photography a reason to be. There is a reason for it to survive. He who sees the seal first must shoot it. You saw, you fired. And you learned how to dance. Congratulations on Sabine.