Jacob Aue Sobol was born in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1976. A photographer and member of Magnum Photos, he has published several monographs of his unique, expressive style of black-and-white photography and exhibited his work widely. His images focus on the universality of human emotion and the search for love within oftentimes harsh surroundings.
Jacob lived in Canada from 1994-95 and Greenland from 2000-2002. In Spring 2006 he moved to Tokyo, living there 18 months before returning to Denmark in August 2008. He has traveled extensively in the years since, photographing in Siberia, Thailand, Mongolia, America, and China while staying based in Copenhagen.
After studying at the European Film College, in 1998 Jacob was admitted to Fatamorgana, a Danish school for documentary and art photography. In the autumn of 1999 he went to live in the settlement Tiniteqilaaq on the East Coast of Greenland. Over the next three years, he lived mainly in this township with his Greenlandic girlfriend Sabine and her family, living the life of a fisherman and seal hunter but also photographing. The resulting book Sabine was published in 2004.
In the summer of 2005, Jacob traveled with a film crew to Guatemala to make a documentary about a young Mayan girl’s first journey to the ocean. The following year he returned by himself to the mountains of Guatemala, where he met the indigenous Gomez-Brito family. He stayed with them for a month to tell the story of their everyday life. The series won first prize in the Daily Life category of World Press Photo in 2006.
In 2006 he moved to Tokyo and during the next two years, he created the images for the book I, Tokyo, which was awarded the Leica European Publishers Award in 2008.
Following his time in Tokyo, Jacob worked extensively in Bangkok, resulting in the 2016 book By the River of Kings. In 2012 he began photographing along the Trans-Siberian Railroad and spent the next five winters photographing in the remote Russian province of Yakutia for his project Road of Bones. He has ongoing projects in Denmark, Home and the United States, America.
