Sohrab Hura

Sohrab Hura (born 17 October 1981) is an Indian photographer based in New Delhi. He is a full member of Magnum Photos. Hura's self-published trilogy Sweet Life comprises the books Life is Elsewhere (2015), A Proposition for Departure (2017) and Look It's Getting Sunny Outside!!! (2018); the latter was shortlisted for Photobook of the Year in the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards. He has also self-published The Coast (2019) and The Levee (2020). His work has been shown in solo exhibitions in London and in Kolkata, India.

Hura was born in Chinsurah, West Bengal, India. He attended The Doon School in Dehradun, Uttarakhand and has a masters in economics from the Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi. He began making photographs during college with a Nikon FM10 given to him by his father. He is now based in New Delhi, India.

Hura's Sweet Life trilogy of books focuses on his relationship with his mother, who was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in 1999, when he was 17 years old. The trilogy's Life Is Elsewhere was made between 2005 and 2011, and Look It's Getting Sunny Outside!!! was made between 2008 and 2014.

In 2011 The British Journal of Photography included Hura in its "Ones to Watch." He became a nominee member of Magnum Photos in 2014 (the second Indian photographer to become a nominee member) an Associate member in 2018, and a full member in 2020. Sean O'Hagan, writing in The Guardian, included Hura's The Lost Head and the Bird exhibition in his "The top 10 photography exhibitions of 2017".

Source: Wikipedia

Sohrab Hura’s vivid, sometimes surreal photography explores his position with the world that he exists in. Though Hura initially worked through the prism of social documentary, he soon turned his strong vision inward, creating visual journals of his life and personal relationships as a means to “find his own logic”.

Hura was born on 17th October 1981 in a small town called Chinsurah in West Bengal, India. He grew up with many varied career ambitions but eventually settled on photography, after completing his Masters in Economics at the Delhi School of Economics.

His first projects, The River (a series that explores three cities along the river Ganges and its tributary) and Land of a Thousand Struggles (which followed a grassroots movement in rural India that led to an important social security act), were made simultaneously in 2005-06. Though both were made with auspicious intentions, Hura later decided to turn his back on this kind social documentary work and instead focus on issues which reflected his personal experience.

Hura’s work has been shown in exhibitions around the world. Upcoming exhibitions include The Levee at Cincinnati Art Museum, The Lost Head & The Bird at True/False Film Festival: Columbia Missouri and La Fete Du Slip, Lausanne and Snow at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge UK—all in 2019. He has published three books to date: Life is Elsewhere (2015), A Proposition For Departure (2017), Look It’s Getting Sunny Outside!!! (2018) with the fourth, The Coast (2019).

He is currently working on a series called SNOW, which looks at Kashmir through the prism of the arrival and melting of snow across the three phases of winter.

Hura is currently based in New Delhi, India. He joined Magnum Photos as a nominee in 2014 and became an associate in 2018.

Source: Wikipedia

The Coast

By Sohrab Hura

Publisher : Publisher : Ugly Dog

2019

The Coast opens with an absurd short story that leads into a sequence of images taken along the Indian coastline. While the photographs are made in real situations, the continuous removal and addition of context manipulates the line between what is fact and what is not, in a way not unlike how new realities are increasingly being engineered today.

Some might imagine the book to be a fable-like tale while others might recognize in it reality. Either way, the book in its stories alludes to undercurrents in a country that is seeing higher frequencies of violence: religious, caste, sexual or otherwise and the increasing normalization of it, which is far more absurd than the story itself.

There is respite toward the end as the book moves to the sea. The margin between land and water becomes a point of release beyond which characters experience fear, surprise, anger, sadness, trust, anticipation, excitement, contempt but also rapture. The short story at the beginning of the book also exists in 11 other iterations, each one changing only a few words at a time like a game of Chinese Whispers.

Just like with the images, each story forms a slightly different meaning in every subsequent reading and it becomes one of a dozen different truths. The Coast is the fourth book by Sohrab Hura.

Look It's Getting Sunny Outside!!!

By Sohrab Hura

Publisher : Publisher : Ugly Dog

2018

"Over the years when my mother’s condition started to improve I started to photograph at home more. Apart from my mother the focus of the photographs also included her dog Elsa who had been her sole companion at home for many years and also the house itself whose condition deteriorated or improved as my mother’s illness regressed or progressed.

Her relationship with Elsa which had substituted intimate human contact as simple as touch or conversation all these years, had played a big part in my mother’s improvement. In February of 2014 Elsa died having grown old in her 13th year.

That winter was a strange one because for the first time it had rained everyday and the sun wasn’t seen on most days. Towards the end my mother had even opened up to my father with whom she had separated almost 15 years ago. It was her separation with him that had triggered her illness in the first place."

A Proposition for Departure

By Sohrab Hura

Publisher : Publisher : Ugly Dog

2017

Created and printed by Sohrab Hura to accompany his exhibition of the same title, A Proposition for Departure focuses on the relationship between light and sound, and reads as an instructional guide for the artist, dictating the sound extractions that Hura would create from a selection of his photographs.

Life Is Elsewhere

By Sohrab Hura

Publisher : Publisher : Self Published

2015

Self-published (under the imprint Ugly Dog press) in 2015 (here). Hardcover with dust jacket, 144 pages, with 84 black and white photographs. Includes multiple hand written texts by the artist. In an edition of 600 copies. Sohrab Hura is a young Indian photographer, from a small place called Chinsurah in West Bengal.

Trained as an economist, he gradually turned to photography, shooting his immediate surroundings, family and close friends, simply “making photographs just for the love of making photographs”. Eventually, he made the leap to photography as his main occupation, and last year Hura became the latest Magnum Photos nominee. It’s been quite an artistic and personal journey in such a short period of time. The photographs he took between 2005 and 2011 have become part of an inwardly felt project entitled Life is Elsewhere. This recently self-published photobook is a diary of Hura’s day to day existence at that time, combining photography and hand written captions in an attempt to bring order to the various fragments of his life.

The book, which is dedicated to his mother, reads like a personal journey. Hura begins with a bright, flash lit silhouette of a person in the middle of the street, seemingly glowing or emitting intense, almost blinding energy (can this be a reference to the photographer himself?); it is followed by a neatly handwritten introduction. From these notes, we learn about Hura’s complicated and emotionally challenging relationship with his mother – she screams, she beats him, and sometimes even disbelieves that he is her son. In 1999, she was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, when Hura was just 17.

Sohrab Hura

Agency

Magnum Photos

Website

www.sohrabhura.com

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