Quote: "When I photograph, I try to use my instincts as much as possible. It is when pictures are thoughtless and irrational that they come to life; that they evolve from showing to being."
Jacob Aue Sobol became a nominee in 2007

Jacob Aue Sobol
Danish, b. 1976

Born in Copenhagen. Lived in Canada 1994-95 and in Greenland 2000-2002. Has been living in Tokyo since 2006.

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 B?rse 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.

Jacob is currently working on a new book project in Tokyo to be published in 2008.

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.