Photobook Review: Tell My Love Now by Sara Aue Sobol

Tell My Love Now by Sara Aue Sobol tells the story of two winters, one in Russia, one in Denmark. Those pictures are united by another winter, the depression of the author’s partner Jacob Aue Sobol.

The book comes in three sections, Part 1 is on darkness, Part 2 on hope, and Part 3 on love.

There’s a storyline then, and it begins with their meeting in Denmark. She is a student and Aue Sobol is a photographer.

But the storyline is not linear. The pictures are not linear, and the text, which is central to the book, is not linear. The text begins with her anger. It’s 2023. “Why are you so angry?” she is asked. She is angry because he is depressed. She is confused because he is depressed. She is exhausted because he is depressed.

We see a picture of a woman, a younger version of Sara, paired these starting words, her eyes moist, tears about to flow as she stares direct into the camera.

The way we feel age is not linear, and nor is the way we feel love, hatred, anger, or fear. Emotion runs through the book in images of lovers kissing on a bed, orchards growing skew-whiff on a cluttered Russian window shelf, a brown velvet curtain with strings of Christmas snowflakes hanging over a yellow velvet sofa.

They first meet in 2015 when she arrives in Copenhagen on a one-way ticket from Milan. She has a broken childhood and a broken dream. She needs love and she meets Jacob. She is a fan and buys a copy of his book, Sabine. They play ping pong, he works in his studio, they fall in love, they work, non-stop from morning to night, they drink red wine and watch a movie from Blockbusters. It’s how he works so it’s how she works, and then they break up. She goes to Russia with a broken heart.

She makes friends, she shares a flat in Moscow, she hangs out with Vlad, she drinks vodka and eats pickled herring, then leaves the city in search of more. There is always more, always a search for an imagined togetherness. She finds Terberka, a city where the water turns to fog. She thinks of Jacob. She has found a place she could love. But where is the person she could love.

There are winter landscapes and grimy corridors ending in double doors, bodies embracing, bare breasts and legs and the search everywhere for love. She returns to Denmark, she seeks a new life, she studies, she returns to Jacob, just as Jacob’s life falls apart.

It’s 2023 and Jacob is seeing a psychiatrist. He’s lost 12kg in the last four weeks, he’s running every day, Sara thinks talking to Jacob is like talking to somebody underwater. She wants things calm, she wants to get to the surface.

But what is the surface and where is the surface. Perhaps that is what the book is about, knowing when you have found what you are looking for, knowing where the surface is.

The book ends in 2016. It’s Sara’s birthday and she needs to leave Russia. She has a necklace of black stones that she will share with her friend Katja. They’ll wear it a while then send it to the other. They do this for a few times and then they stop. Everything comes to an end, except the things that really matter.

And by the end of the book, perhaps Sara has found some peace. And Jacob too.

Things are beautiful
also when they get ugly.

It’s 2019.

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Tell My Love Now by Sara Aue Sobol is co-published by TIS Books and Sobol Books

Editor: Sun Hee Engelstoft
23cm x 19cm
92 pages, 60 color images
Foil stamped hardcover with color tip-on image
ISBN 9781943146383
For friends based in US, Canada, Central or South America please order from TIS Books

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Sara Aue Sobol started photographing as a teenager, as a way to find herself in a very conservatory society, in Italy. Art gave her the space to find herself and ask herself questions about our shared humanity and the nature of our feelings. When she was 19 she moved out of her mentally ill mother’s apartment, moved to Copenhagen, and attended Fatamorgana, a school of art and documentary photography. She started working at the same time as a studio assistant and darkroom printer for Jacob Aue Sobol. At the end of her studies, she travelled for 4 months in Russia. Today this journey is about to become a book, Tell My Love Now. She returned to Denmark and became the art director for her husband, Jacob Aue Sobol.

Colin Pantall is a photographer, writer and lecturer based in Bath, England. His next online courses and in person workshops begin in January, 2025. More information here. Follow him on Instagram.