Artist presentation
Sara Aue Sobol
I started photographing as a teenager, as a way to find myself in a very conservatory society,
Italy. Art gave me the space to find myself, ask myself questions about our shared humanity
and the nature of our feelings. When I was 19 I moved out my mentally ill mother’s
apartment, moved to Copenhagen and attended Fatamorgana, school of art and
documentary photography. I started working at the same time as a studio assistant and
darkroom printer for Jacob Aue Sobol. At the end of my studies I travelled for 4 months in
Russia, this journey is a book, Tell My Love Now.
Afterwards I have been working for the New York office at Magnum Photos, raised 10k USD
with a kickstarter campaign to fund my next project in Mexico, where I travelled for 10
months.
I returned to Denmark and became a mother of 2 alongside I am the art director of Jacob
Aue Sobol. We produce new work and raise our children on a small island, southern of
Denmark. In June 2025 I will exhibit Fleetingly Beautiful in Copenhagen, where an exhibition
catalogue will be self published. During Les Rencontres D’Arles 2025, Night Of The Year,
Tell My Love Now will be displayed in the main venues of the festival.
Artist statement
Sara Aue Sobol (b. 1993) is an Italian visual artist based in Denmark. Her photographic
practice is rooted in a diaristic and poetic methodology, merging intimate personal narratives
with a Nordic sensibility for documentary and conceptual clarity. Working across themes of
cultural displacement, ecology, motherhood, and the porous boundary between reality and
dreams, she seeks to articulate a visual language that resonates with the quiet complexity of
human experience.
Sobol’s images are shaped by a sensitivity to time—its elasticity, its passing, and the traces
it leaves behind. The domestic, the bodily, and the wild coexist in her work, often overlapping
in subtle gestures or symbolic motifs. Through slow observation and analog processes, she
cultivates a tactile relationship with the photographic medium, treating it as both document
and vessel.
Project Description
Fleetingly Beautiful stems from my photographic work, which I began in 2019 when my
family and I moved to Onsevig (western Lolland) from Copenhagen shortly after the birth of
our daughter.
In Onsevig, I am confronted with isolation and find myself in direct contact with nature and
time. Without the distractions that are a significant part of life in Copenhagen, life changes in
harmony with the shifting seasons and their ever-changing focus on plants and animals.
Through photographs, Fleetingly Beautiful conveys the vulnerable state of being a part of
life’s delicate cycle – from fishing and gathering in nature to support the family, to the
transition from young woman to motherhood and the natural development of human
existence. Fleetingly Beautiful is a visual exploration of the fragility and intensity of life.
But the project is not only about the beauty of life; it also speaks to the impermanence found
in the knowledge that everything changes; time passes, and as artists, we constantly create
new spaces that must be explored and seen in relation to our present moment.
Fleetingly Beautiful makes visible and challenges the spaces that exist for a time before
completely disappearing. It is especially relevant to use photography here, as it can capture
a moment of something beautiful – but also fleeting. What we see no longer exists. This is
the very core of photography. In this way, Fleetingly Beautiful encourages the audience to
reflect on the fragility and transitory nature of life.
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