James’ House

Title: James’ House
Original title: Jame’s House
Author: Jacob Aue Sobol
ISBN: 978-4-908512-60-5
Publisher: Super Labo

James’ House is the second volume in Magnum photographer Jacob Aue Sobol’s trilogy about Greenland. Sobol arrived there in 1999 at the age of twenty-two, carrying the grief of his father’s sudden death. “I had to do it,” he said of travelling to Tiniteqilaaq. “I was searching for something, though I didn’t know what it was.”

After falling in love with a local woman named Sabine, he stayed in the isolated settlement, believing he had found what he was looking for and would never leave. From 1999 to 2002, he became one of the Arctic community’s 150 residents. During those years, Sobol never thought of himself as a photographer. What interested him was “living as a hunter and fisherman, alongside the Inuit people there.”

He later made a photobook about his relationship with Sabine. Titled Sabine, it brought him international acclaim. Eighteen years after that book appeared, Sobol published the second volume in his trilogy about his time in Greenland—this time, about James.

James was an Inuit hunter and the father of ten children. He took Sobol in and taught him how to hunt, fish, and read the ice. Sobol spent a great deal of time in his home. For him, James’ House is “a tribute to the man and his family, who meant so much to me when I was young.”

Sobol often travelled with James on hunting trips lasting several days, or sat quietly beside him for hours, waiting for seals to emerge onto the ice. The Inuit way of life came naturally to him.

The photobook also depicts the hunt, including images of seals being killed, skinned, and eaten.

There are photographs of fish lying on the ice, waiting to be gutted, and rows of halibut and wolffish laid out across its surface.

There are fishing holes, harpoons, and sledges for carrying the catch home.

At night, he was like another of James’s children, sleeping in the same bedroom as the family.

The Arctic’s extreme environment, the intimacy of James’s large family, and the close-knit community of Tiniteqilaaq became a microcosm in which Sobol could explore his deepest longings.

As always, his photographs gave expression to what mattered to him: love, the intimacy of family, and whatever made him laugh or cry, angry or happy.

Over time, the harsh environment in which Sobol lived began to take its toll.

In such a small community, the beauty and love he experienced with such intensity were matched by grief and tragedy. It was in their responses to both that he came to recognize the differences between himself, James, and Sabine. In their culture, tragedy was not spoken about, nor were there plans to address the community problems that led Sobol’s friends to leave or take their own lives.

When he finally left, he felt that his time in Greenland had been an utter failure. “I still loved Sabine and James’s family, and so many of the beautiful things there.” Looking back twenty years later, he could clearly see how that indelible experience continued to shape his life. In his memory—and now on paper—James’ House is Sobol’s “beautiful record of sharing life with James’s family.”

Throughout Sobol’s work, he tries to draw close to people through the camera’s physical proximity, and this is unmistakable in the photographs here. He moves into the midst of the children as they dance and play; when a father and child place their hands on the floor, he lowers himself into the carpet with them; a stuffed walrus looks up into the lens. The children are held and comforted, play cards, and watch television, while a current of tension runs through the images.

Sobol photographed on black-and-white film with a Leica M6 and a 35 mm lens. At first glance, the images may appear haphazardly composed, heavily grained, blurred, and, by the conventional standards of salon photography, decidedly second-rate. Yet it is precisely their unconventional compositions, asymmetrical arrangements, and generous use of empty space that create such a deep, mysterious, and unsettling atmosphere. His compositions are spare, retaining only what is essential, while the textures and tactile qualities of black-and-white film direct the viewer’s attention more fully toward subject and emotion. By using flash and shooting handheld, Sobol captured movement within each scene, heightening the series’ drama and tension.

Note: The images are reproduced from the photobook and remain the copyright of the original author.

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