Jacob Aue Sobol

Jacob Aue Sobol documents his repeated journeys along the Trans-Siberian Railway and its branch lines through Russia, Mongolia, and China (Moscow, Ulan Bator, Beijing) in 2012. Shot in intense, sometimes near-obsessive bursts, often over 1,000 frames a day across 28-day trips, the work is rendered in stark, dramatic black-and-white images.

Rather than a travelogue celebrating the romance of the railway, the book is an intimate, non-narrative meditation on cultural transition and disconnection: Sobol focuses on private, unguarded moments of the people he encounters, capturing discomfort, loneliness, and the emotional gap between traveler and stranger as globalization reshapes these societies. Writer Pico Iyer has described the images as "antisnapshots" deliberately resisting easy, postcard-like interpretation in favor of raw, unresolved human contact.

It's a companion piece of sorts to Sobol's earlier, similarly intimate diaristic work like Sabine and I, Tokyo, applying that same close, emotionally exposed style to a much larger geographic canvas.

‍

‍

I, Tokyo documents Sobol's roughly 18-month stay in Tokyo starting in 2006. He arrived feeling anonymous and cut off from the city, struck by the silence of the commute, the lack of eye contact, the sense of isolation in such a dense population, and used a pocket camera to work through that alienation. Rather than photographing landmarks or crowds, he went looking for "narrow paths and individual human presence": close, textured, often intimate images, weathered hands, foggy breath on glass, skin, gesture, shot spontaneously and instinctively rather than planned. The book traces his shift from feeling invisible in Tokyo to gradually making the city his own through the camera, arriving at something more like a contemplative, emotionally raw self-portrait of urban isolation than a documentary record of the place.

It follows the same diaristic, close-to-the-skin approach as his earlier acclaimed book Sabine, applied here to an unfamiliar foreign city instead of a personal relationship.

‍

The second installment in Sobol's Greenland Trilogy, following his 2004 debut Sabine, drawn from photographs taken in Eastern Greenland between 1999 and 2002. The book centers on Sobol's friendship with James, an Inuit hunter and fisherman from the settlement of Tiniteqilaaq, and the time Sobol spent living alongside him as he worked to sustain his family through hunting and fishing. Through James, Sobol learned to read the ice, identify seals, and absorb an unspoken discipline of knowing when to speak and when to stay silent. The photographs trace the intimacy and warmth of James's household before it was upended by the death of his wife and his subsequent move to Tasiilaq, making the book as much an elegy for a vanished way of life as a portrait of friendship.