The exhibition ‘Sabine’ by Jacob Aue Sobol at Open Eye finishes on July 15th. I quite like this one as its an interesting story, some of the pictures seem very personal though, so much so that I’m not really sure I should be looking at them, I feel I’m intruding.
“I’m in love. Sabine is 19 and I’m 23. I�ve decided to stay in Tiniteqilaaq. I want to be a hunter”
– Jacob Aue Sobol, 2000
Danish photographer Jacob Aue Sobol travelled to Greenland in 1999 to photograph life in Tiniteqilaaq, a small hunter settlement on the remote East coast. After five weeks he left, only to return four months later, feeling that his camera had not yet captured the multiple layers of this very different reality. It was then that Jacob fell in love with Sabine, who become the main character in his book of the project, published in Denmark in 2004.
Tiniteqilaaq means “the strait that runs dry at low tide”. In Jacob’s photographs, the harshness and intensity of the Greenlandic landscape intertwines with the raw physicality of his time with Sabine.
In fearless, evocative shots Sabine smiles, makes faces, dozes, seduces, gets upset, and cries. Jacob gets close-up to show her reckless vitality and changing expressions. Beyond the world of their tiny house Jacob made friends with the hunters who took it upon themselves to train him.
During their excursions he looks around with fascination, stopping to record footprints in the snow and wind storms, hunting nets glowing in the dark, a dead seal being dragged to the nearest kitchen.