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

[mark at rabinergroup.com (Mark Rabiner)]

I'd bet those two Danish guys went to the same fine art photo Danish school
Fatamorgana:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatamorgana_(photo_school)

Here is Sobols Wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Aue_Sobol

Sobol seemed and seems like a young twenties guy right out of school in love
for the first time. He lived with her for a long time before he ever took
one picture of her. She was 19 he was 23. The whole thing seems more than
Kosher to me I'm more prone toward calling it Great art and artists have
been photographing their girlfriends etc since the Flintstones.

I think he's shooting what's in front of him and what connects with him in a
very basic way which is no doubt what some teacher recommended him to do..
You can go crazy denying your conditioning and education and not doing
anything because its maybe been done before. Trust me. Its been done before.
By Aristotle and Euclid with a camera Obscura no doubt 2300 years ago. When
you even try to rip somebody else you can  count yourself lucky if you have
the talent to even pull it off. I even think its a good first approach for a
photographer or any artist.
Ironically what we first saw of him is him shooting digital for the very
first time and with a Leica for the first time. From what I heard he didn't
use in the past honking DSLR's but compact toy like film cameras. That's
just from what I was able to pick up.
I think when your overcome with unfamiliar tools like that its as hard to
rip people off as it is to be original. You just have to just shoot what's
in front of you and let the people later decide who they think you're
imitating.

I think Leica is in inspired and very good hands. Its all terribly exciting.
Especially in the context of the very few years ago when every single person
on this list excepting one or two were discussing Leica in the past tense.
As its now about to take over the photographic universe as we know it;
Soon it will be.... if your not using an S2 or M10 for that top magazine
story/catalog you're about to shoot you're just out of the loupe.
And in a couple of years the two tools of choice will be the S3 and the M11.
Nikon and Canon revert to making Digital Brownie Box cameras for the not so
bright set.




- - from my iRabs.
Mark Rabiner
http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/lugalrabs/springdays/


> From: Mitch Alland <mitcha at mac.com>
> Reply-To: Leica Users Group <lug at leica-users.org>
> Date: Sat, 16 Jun 2012 06:44:39 +0700
> Subject: Re: [Leica] Final Sobol Photos with MM Part II the beginning
> 
>> 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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