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

[richard at richardmanphoto.com (Richard Man)]

You know, I thought his name sound familiar!

I saw him speaking once, along with a few others who were featured in a
SFMOMA exhibit and "artist talk." He was showing his Greenland work there.



On Fri, Jun 15, 2012 at 4:44 PM, Mitch Alland <mitcha at mac.com> wrote:

> > 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/
>
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>



-- 
// richard <http://www.richardmanphoto.com>