[Leica] Final Sobol Photos with MM Part II the beginning

[mitcha at mac.com (Mitch Alland)]

> On 6/15/12 2:28 PM, "Mark Rabiner" <mark at rabinergroup.com> wrote:
> 
> I think if you Googled and wiki'd and Binged Jacob Au Sobol the only place 
> you're ever going to find anything negati writing about him is on an email 
> list called the Leica Users group.

Actually Jacob Aue Sobol has been controversial for several reasons. One is 
whether his first book on his, then, girlfriend in Greenland, "Sabine", was 
exploitative, but I won't go into that. My first exposure to him was his 
book "I Tokyo", which won the Leica European Publishers Award in 2008. I was 
attracted by the look, high contrast with deep, rich blacks. However, I 
thought that the subject matter was more than derivative of Daida Moriyama: 
here's a young Danish photographer who comes to Tokyo and photographs 
Shinjuku and his vision of Shinjuku is that of Moriyama. What I didn't know 
at the time is that he Sobol was being criticized for also appropriating the 
"grunge style" -- I am using shorthand language here -- of Anders Peterson.

The issues that have been posed by Sobol's photography relate to how 
original a photographer should be -- how much his work uses Moriyama and 
Andersen as "points of departure" and how much is is simply "appropriation". 
My feelings are that is acceptable for a photographer to experiment with the 
style of other photographers and see where he or she can take it. Think of 
Gauguin at Pont Aven using the heavy black and blue lines for contours of 
his younger friend Claude Bernard ("cloisonnisme"). Bernard later accused 
Gauguin of stealing his method, but look what Gauguin did with it, creating 
masterpieces that, by then, had nothing to do with Bernard's work. In this 
the same way, Sobol has taken the look used by Andersen and Moriyama -- 
indeed "I, Tokyo" was shot with the same camera that Moriyama uses, the 
Ricoh GR1. The question is whether Sobol has developed enough of his own 
vision or whether he is still imitative of Moriyama and Andersen. 

I think that he has, but, while I like the general "look" of his 
photography, I think that there is still sometimes generally too much 
posturing or theater in his work. To me, that comes from his staged shots 
and what looks like pretense when he says how much he wants to relate to his 
subjects -- can he relate deeply to his (sometimes naked) subjects in a a 
day or so in Moscow, Ulan Bator, and Beijing? That is pretense. Reminds me 
of when heard ago she spoke how the extremely poor laborers that she had 
photographed along the Ganges in Benares were all here friends ? come on, 
none of these guys spoke English.

Still, he is a good photographer and, I think, is likely to become a better 
artist. I find the Bangkok series (on his website) superior to "Arrivals and 
Departures"; but then he presumably spent more time in Bangkok than in the 
cities of "Arrivals and Departures"  -- so that there is less pretense. BTW, 
how do you think the looks of his Bangkok film shots compare to the 
M-Monocchrom shots?

As for Leica using Sobol for the M-Monochrom campaign, I think it's simply a 
case of some of the Leica management liking his work, rather than a finely 
tuned marketing campaign of "puffery". It's a gutsy and bold move and I like 
it: very different than the pablum served up by other camera companies 
advertising a new camera.

--Mitch/Chiang Mai
http://www.flickr.com/photos/10268776 at N00/