This attitude is echoed in the work of the 23 year-old Dane, Jacob Aue Sobol, travelling to East Greenland at the begin- ning of the new millennium. Neither his images nor his words shout. Even though his camera captures violent images there is no showing off. The intensity of the images emerges from the unspoken, the ambivalent, the understated. Sobol originally set out to take photographs in Tiniteqilaaq. Even the name of the place implies the ends of the earth: The strait that runs dry at low tide. After ve weeks he had had enough. He took his black and white photographs and headed home albeit with the sense that his village portrait was distorted. Four months later he returned to face the small society that had far more layers and levels of meaning than he had seen at rst.

And that is when Greenland captures him. The mountain landscape lies transparent and luminous, and the frozen waters lure him. He makes friends among the hunters, who take it upon themselves to train him. When this new existence sud- denly starts to function despite the arctic cold he can provide himself with food the pampered motherland to the south shrinks into the pallid past and he resolves to test his strength against East Greenland’s basic, existential challenges. But behind this decision lies his true motivation: Falling in love with Sabine.

The cover photograph leads with the love theme. Through the small heart-shaped window of her ngers the main character sends a signal to the photographer who, his hands in the same position, snaps his rectangular counter-signal a picture that frames and captures everything. The game begins. The diary excerpts provide us with glimpses of his selfappointed education as the provider-to-be at the sealing net, as the sherman on the ice, as the husband in the shower and dig deeper into his growing self-realization through notes on cultural clashes, chapters on the Piteraq storm, or close encounters with death. The photographs are less fragmentary, structurally linked through a series of exterior pictures wrapped around a sequence of interior pictures, more often than not with Sabine as their subject and focus. Yet concentrated glimpses (like the split seal on the bathroom oor) also link nature and the struggle for survival with a steaming eroticism. The pelting ice storms that alternate with the silence of the arctic darkness surrounding the house imply an unpredictability mirrored in Sabine’s changing expressions passionate, arch, childishly unselfconscious, demo- niacal, tender, headstrong, jealous, cool, devastated. The camera strikes like the erratic shifts in temperature indoors and out. The outcome is uncertain. We stand, sit and lie with the photographer, wondering at the chaos, the riddle of lines. Two central images depart from this series: An interior shot meeting the direct gaze of a group of happy Greenlanders classical pre-colonial openness were it not for the girl in the centre shutting us out with her folded arms and the confron- tational look on her unsmiling face. And an exterior bird’s-eye view of a large group of villagers gathered as a community at a funeral. Both images depict the solidarity village life demands and depends upon, whilst leaving a crack open for a contradictory gaze: The gaze that registers the man with the camera eye, the outsider, the Dane.

For as it gradually emerges goodwill is not enough. Not even love can bridge the gap when the abyss is as bottomless as that between two cultures in disintegration and crisis. Sabine’s small, passionate heart-shaped window on the cover is captured and reected in Jacob’s photographic rectangle. Here the denouement is established: The ups and downs of love delineate the story and are « presumably » abandoned on the last page. Is it the sensitive artist that gives shape and meaning to life through his work, or is it the woman, life and destiny that hews the man and makes him an artist? Or is it just the inescapable: The strait that runs dry at low tide? »

Finn Thrane
Director, Museet for Fotokunst, Odense, Denmark