Jacob Aue Sobol conceived With and Without You as a tribute to his father, who died when the photographer was twenty. The title gives absence an active place within the book: loss is not treated simply as an event in the past, but as a continuing condition through which Sobol’s work can be reconsidered.
Published by Super Labo in 2016, the 224-page volume brings together selections from four previously published bodies of work. Its retrospective form is therefore also personal. Rather than isolating a single project, it gathers photographs made across Sobol’s documentary practice beneath a memorial premise, allowing images produced at different stages to acquire new associations. The book is less a conventional biography of the father than an account of how one relationship—and its ending—can remain present within an artist’s wider production.
The timing sharpens that structure. The book was printed for Sobol’s fortieth birthday, approximately two decades after his father’s death. That correspondence between age, memory, and publication turns the volume into a deliberate act of looking back. By placing earlier work within this frame, Sobol makes retrospection part of the subject: the photographs carry their original histories, while the book asks them to speak again from a later point in his life.
For collectors, its importance rests on this combination of survey and self-interpretation. With and Without You offers a concentrated view of Sobol’s personal documentary work while demonstrating how editorial selection and a unifying title can redirect the meaning of existing photographs. It deserves attention not merely as an assembly of earlier material, but as a considered example of the photobook used to revise an artist’s own history through grief, memory, and return.
