Jacob Aue Sobol
I, Tokyo
- PhotographerJacob Aue Sobol
SØREN SOLKÆR Sobol’s photographs, with their raw black-and-white materiality, are not portraits in the traditional sense; they are encounters. An unfiltered expression reaching out to the world looking for connection to the innermost essential form of humanity. A place where primal vulnerability meets beauty.
Sobol has been a full member of Magnum Photos since 2012. He lives on a small Danish island, where he photographs, makes books and goes fishing.
Jacob Aue Sobol - I, Tokyo
When Danish photographer Jacob Aue Sobol arrived in Tokyo in the spring of 2006, he was swallowed by a city of neon lights and crowded sidewalks. For months he felt invisible, adrift in a metropolis where people hurried past without acknowledgement, their gazes fixed forward. Out of this alienation grew I, Tokyo, a photobook that would earn Sobol the Leica European Publishers Award for Photography in 2008 and cement his place among the most compelling voices of contemporary documentary photography.
Published by Dewi Lewis, the book is a raw and poetic portrait of Tokyo, built from eighteen months of wandering with a small pocket camera. Sobol turned away from sweeping skylines and iconic architecture, instead immersing himself in the city’s undercurrents - the narrow alleyways, the texture of daily life, the fleeting intimacy of encounters with strangers. The resulting images are high-contrast black-and-white fragments: lovers entangled, shadows across a face, a child’s expression caught between joy and fear.
What makes I, Tokyo resonate is not its geography but its emotional charge. Sobol has always photographed by instinct, chasing moments of vulnerability and connection rather than formal perfection. In Tokyo, this instinct became a lifeline. The book carries the weight of solitude, but it is also full of tenderness - a reminder that even in the anonymity of a megacity, intimacy is possible.
Critics have noted that while the work is unmistakably set in Japan, its emotional landscape is universal. The Tokyo of Sobol’s eye is not the postcard city of skyscrapers and Shibuya crossings, but a place of human presence and absence, where loneliness collides with sudden bursts of closeness.
More than a travelogue, I, Tokyo is an inward journey projected onto the streets of one of the world’s busiest cities. Sobol’s Tokyo is not a city to be mapped, but to be felt.
