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2009 EDITION

July 7th - September 13th

Jacob Aue Sobol - Untitled

Jacob Aue Sobol

I arrived in Tokyo for the first time in Spring 2006. My friend Sara had found a job there and I decided to go with her to discover the city she grew up in—a totally new environment I knew close to nothing about and where nothing was particularly attractive.

At first I felt invisible. I walked along the streets without meeting a single person’s eye; in the train I took almost every morning from Nakano to Shinjuku hardly a word was spoken. The city and its inhabitants seemed impenetrable, but this dense, concentrated life was fascinating too. Desperately looking for a way to break out of this feeling of isolation and loneliness, I finally started taking my pocket camera to the streets and parks. Instead of photographing gigantic towers or endless crowds, I turned to narrow side streets and individual presences in the heart of this city which both attracted and repelled me. I wanted to meet the locals, be part of the metropolis, make Tokyo mine. The photographs in this series represent what I saw and the people I mixed with during the next eighteen months. I think the people I met helped me understand what being part of Tokyo is now. Some of them became friends; with others I only shared a few moments.

My work took shape through chance encounters, with no other guide than my own curiosity, my mood and my impressions of the city I was discovering. I worked as instinctively as possible. Taking photos is like improvising a game. It seems to me that the more a photo is spontaneous and unplanned, the more it feels alive, the more it makes the transition from demonstration to existence.


Jacob Aue Sobol


www.auesobol.dk

Jacob Aue Sobol became a nominee at Magnum Photos in 2007.

Jacob Aue Sobol won the European Publishers Award for Photography in 2008. This award has been bestowed for the past 15 years by a group of publishers which in 2008 comprised: Actes Sud (France), Apeiron (Greece), Dewi Lewis Publishing (UK), Edition Braus (Germany), Lunwerg Editores (Spain), Mets&Schilt (Netherlands) and Peliti Associati (Italy). Tokyo will be published by each of these houses.

Jacob Aue Sobol

Born in 1976 in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Lives in Tokyo, Japan.


After studying at the European Film College, Jacob Aue Sobol enrolled in 1998 at Fatamorgana, the Danish school of documentary and art photography. There he developed the photographic language that would inform his images of Tiniteqilaaq, a settlement in eastern Greenland where he stayed in autumn 1999. For the next three years, he resided in this village in the home of his Greenlander girlfriend Sabine and her family, living the life of a fisherman and hunter. In 2004 he published Sabine, a book of photography and narrative that tells of how he met the young woman, and of their daily life on the east coast of Greenland. This book won the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize in 2005.

In summer 2005, Jacob Aue Sobol took a film crew to Guatemala to shoot a documentary about a young Maya girl’s first trip to the ocean. The following year, he returned alone to the mountains of the country, spending a month with the indigenous Gomez-Brito family to document their everyday life. This project earned him a first prize at the World Press Photo 2006 in the ‘daily life stories’ category.

Jacob Aue Sobol became a nominee at Magnum Photos in 2007.

He was presented with the 15th Leica European Publisher’s Award for Photography for his project entitled Tokyo.