‘Home’ is a concept explored by many artists and authors, from David Hockney’s vivid landscapes of Yorkshire to Wordsworth’s poems on the Lake District, and this is the focus of Danish photographer and Magnum member, Jacob Aue Sobol, in his latest project Home, Copenhagen. It’s an interesting idea – returning home to document what’s familiar – but one that has its challenges and advantages for any artist.

Aue Sobol has been constantly on the road since he studied at Fatamorgana, The Danish School of Art Photography. He’s visited Greenland, Guatemala, Tokyo and Bangkok. He’s always been an outsider looking in, however, photographing scenery and local people for Home has forced him to see his own city in new ways. The resulting images avoid stereotypes – there’s not a single bobble-hat wearing cyclist in sight. Instead, Aue Sobol depicts naked ageing bodies, young couples wrapped in embraces, the pruned hedges of suburbia and snowy landscapes shot under the cover of nightfall. Home is also a self-portrait reflecting on who he is; it includes some very personal photographs, in particular, one of his twin brother placing his hand on his grandmother’s forehead as she was dying. “Home is a place of memories. It is where I have my roots. It is a place I keep returning to”, says Aue Sobol. “If I want to learn more about myself and the world I live in, this is where I look – in my own backyard.”

Aue Sobol was born in 1976 in Brøndby Strand – the suburbs south of Copenhagen. He joined Magnum Photos in 2007 and became an associate member in 2010. He attended Fatamorgana between 1998-2000 where he was taught, briefly, by the Swedish photographer, Anders Petersen. Like Aue Sobol, Petersen works predominantly in black-and-white portraiture. “Petersen has had a great influence on my work,” he says. “Morten Bo, the director of Fatamorgana, was inspired to create his school in Copenhagen because of Christer Strömholm’s photography school, Fotoskolan, in Stockholm. Strömholm was Petersen’s teacher.” Aue Sobol is currently putting together a joint exhibition with Petersen that will be held in Riga, Latvia, this year.

After his formal education, Aue Sobol lived, for two years, in a remote corner of Greenland where he put down his camera for a while and learnt to fish and hunt seals. He did, however, meet a native girl and took some photos of her using a small pocket camera, which are published in his outstanding book, Sabine (2004). It’s an intimate, playful insight into their relationship and it’s this emotion that has distinguished Aue Sobol as a photographer ever since. “It all started when I lived with Sabine. Those pictures I took of her had an emotional impact on me and this was the first time I felt a connection between my own inner life and the images I’d created. When I edit my work there has to be an emotional connection and the viewer needs to feel this too,” he says.

One of Aue Sobol’s especially shocking photographs is of a woman giving birth. Other pictures in Home draw attention to physicality, vulnerability and mortality. Aue Sobol sometimes places his subjects – family, friends and strangers – in foetal positions or holding animals, much like Lucian Freud does in his paintings Girl With White Dog (1950-1) and Double Portrait (1988-90).

A number of artists and photographers have produced some of their best work by returning to what they know, and Home represents an important step in Aue Sobol’s career. “I found taking pictures of Copenhagen more difficult in the beginning because it’s what your eye is used to seeing,” he admits. But the results are an original take on the city, thanks to his signature style. “There’s a strong link between my personality and the images. I couldn’t do it any other way and when you try to photograph people’s emotional lives it doesn’t really matter where they are – a young couple in love in Beijing is the same expression as a young couple in love in Denmark,” he says.

Home is pending publication, as is a book based on Aue Sobol’s experiences while travelling in 2012 on the Trans-Siberian Railway, from Moscow to Ulan Bator and Beijing – an assignment commissioned by Leica. Entitled Arrivals and Departures, the project features some of Aue Sobol’s boldest work yet. It seems that the spell at home in Copenhagen has unleashed a renewed energy that will cement his position at Magnum. “I’m a lot more confident and I feel really good about my life in Copenhagen. I live with my girlfriend and I’m close to my family. I enjoy being at home,” he says. That said, Aue Sobol’s wanderlust continues; he’s planning another trip on the Trans- Siberian, stopping off in different places to meet new people and be an outsider once again.