Being in Japan at the moment means also to experience a place where is quite impossible to give a rest to the eyes...the city of Tokyo as well the country offer many opportunities for a photographer and the list all the great photographers who has worked in topics here is huge. Today I would like to post the work from Danish photographer Jacob Aue Sobol, represented by Magnum , who has lived and worked in a project in Tokyo. His work is very interesting to me , although might seem pure reportage the series on tokyo revealed a strong artistic impact.
Here his biography from Magnum web site:
After a period studying at the European Film College, Jacob Aue Sobol was admitted to Fatamorgana, the Danish School of Documentary and Art Photography, in 1998. At Fatamorgana he developed the photographic idiom that runs through his pictures from the East Greenland settlement of Tiniteqilaaq, where he went in the autumn of 1999. Over the next three years he mainly lived in this township with his Greenlandic girlfriend Sabine and her family, living the life of a fisherman and hunter. In 2004 the book Sabine was published. In photographs and narratives it depicts his encounter with Sabine and life on the east coast of Greenland. The book was nominated for Deutche Börse Photography Prize 2005.
In the summer of 2005 Jacob Aue Sobol went with a film crew to Guatemala to make a documentary about a young Mayan girls’ first travel to the ocean. The year after he returned to the mountains of Guatemala by himself. He met the indigenous family Gomez-Brito and decided to stay with them for a month to tell about their everyday life. The series won the First Prize Award, Daily Life Stories, World Press Photo 2006.
His photographs are represented in the Royal Library’s National collection of photography and the National Arts Foundation in Denmark.
In 2007 Jacob became a nominee at Magnum Photos. His latest book project about Tokyo won the 2008 Leica European Publishers' Award, and will be published shortly.
