We meet through photography. We look at each other as we look at the world. We feel the longing and the need for presence. Being close to another human being, we can reflect ourselves. Out of love, a home grows. A family. We are bound to each other forever. We are both hunting hearts in a constant search for presence, believing that despite a world in chaos, there is a place where we can love in peace.
All of Jacob's photographs are ultimately love stories. Love for life. For the other. For the family.
James's House and even more so his new book Hunting Heart are love stories. The second experience that changed him was the meeting with Sara, with whom he had his two children and with whom he shares his life and approach to photography—she is also a photographer—and co-author of the project. Their entire world is told in one continuous shot, like a flow of consciousness through images, in an inseparable circle that makes up their daily life. Even in the deepest intimacy of childbirth. Two hunting hearts who recognized and chose each other, finding their strawberry place. There, on a small Danish island, the rhythms of nature, fishing—which for him means providing for his family, as he learned from James—photography and love mark the rhythms of their existence. She uses color. Jacob uses extreme, flashed black and white. That sudden cast of light on his subjects underlines their intimacy. The camera is an extension of their looking at the world and becomes an instrument of knowledge, of others and of oneself. He doesn´t plan what to shoot. He just does it. How to breathe. How to speak, for him so taciturn and reserved. His photography becomes a free zone in which to express instincts and emotions, it is an introspective journey to meditate on the nature of things through images. Jacob and Sara Aue Sobol do not get fleetingly close to their subjects. Not even when are a brief encounter. Distances, become decidedly intimate. From the first moment, their photography takes the form of a personal and travel diary and it is so close to the person they portray that it makes us forget their presence and leave our gaze in the encounter with the other alone.
The English edition of Hunting Heart is published by Dewi Lewis Publishing. More information is available via Sobol Books.
