An Ode to Joy, Melancholy, and the Curious Cat

“I’ve always understood a place through the relationship that people have with animals. They’re always seeking each other out, maybe because of a kind of loneliness where there’s a longing for touch,” New Delhi-based Sohrab Hura explains of his new, time-limited diptych of signed posters, titled Cats and Stars, available now until Sunday, December 8.

The diptych sees Hura put together two disciplines within his evolving practice: his first, photography, and his newest, painting. Both posters present images of cats. The first shows a black-and-white photograph of one, tail in air, approaching Hura’s lens, stars glimmering in its eyes. Only half of the moment is documented here, from Hura’s point of view, but it is enough to immerse us in a tender moment of connection, affection, and curiosity between animal and human. The image, captioned Françoise, the neighborhood cat, is from the book Life is Elsewhere, published in 2015.

The second poster is of one of Hura’s gouache paintings from 2023, brimming with light and color. A grumpy-looking cat peers out from a tight embrace as it is carried down a woodland path, the star motif present in the unusually green night sky. The Cat That Tried to Run Away But Was Found and Taken Home is the title. The feeling of dejection radiates from the animal’s evident grimace, reminiscent of moments of childhood, perhaps, as playful plans or schemes are thwarted, and a child is reluctantly dragged back to reality by an angry parent.

“I’m not actually a cat person,” Hura explains. “I’ve always been a dog person, but during Covid, I was living in a one-bed terrace apartment and one day found a cat in my kitchen trying to steal food. It turns out the cat had two kittens, and I had no choice but to feed them. They turned out to be extremely loving, and I warmed up to them a bit.”

During the pandemic, he picked up on three trends within his social circles. The first, he describes, is that a lot of his friends started having babies. The second was to get heavily invested in baking bread. And the third, he continues, was to adopt a cat. “For a while, my life was overwhelmed with cats. All my friends seemed to talk about was cats, all their Instagram posts seemed to be about cats, I’d walk into the forest near my house in New Delhi and be confronted by a ginger cat…. People took to cats as they were easily available, a way of combatting loneliness that feels less high-maintenance than dogs, but at the same time cats are arseholes, so I guess this painting is poking a bit at that.”

Through the pages of his latest book, Things Felt But Not Quite Expressed, published by MACK in October 2024, cats and dogs are one of the many motifs that we see in his pastel drawings. Some feel familiar from popular meme culture and social algorithms, while others, as in the gouache painting that Hura has selected for the Drop, see animals almost personified with highly relatable expressions. In one, an angry and wired-looking cat is perched behind a dog, five times its size, sleeping peacefully on its side. Unfinished Argument is the title, inspired by a popular meme.

“My drawings and paintings have become a way to explore themes like love, which are hard to capture through photography. With animals, it’s a way of looking beyond the heteronormative or romantic views of love that our society has been used to. I’m looking at the way we live, our dependence on love, feelings of love, the gentler ways and the more complex aspects of relationships.” 

“There is mischief in my drawings and paintings,” he continues. “Humor, I guess you could say, but a very specific kind, and mixed with melancholy.” A photographer for over two decades, Hura’s principal practice began to shift from photography to painting and drawing in 2022, as he was recovering from the long-term effects of lung damage caused by COVID-19. “Unable to make photographs the way I used to, I discovered drawing and felt unexpectedly attracted to it,” he writes in the book. “Maybe it was the long-forgotten sense of tenderness I discovered in sculpting images into existence with soft pastels, a slowness that reminded me of my early years in photography.”

A shift, perhaps, but also a full-circle moment, he describes now, looking at the two posters that he has selected for his time-limited Signature Drop. There is more that links the two images than the recurring theme of cats and stars as the title suggests. “The photograph of the cat, which features in Life is Elsewhere, comes from a time when I was working really freely with photography. I was experimenting with the medium itself, trying to find magic in light, pushing the film by many stops, developing the rolls myself, working with all kinds of cameras…” he explains. “I was searching for something, meandering, using photography as an escape from reality, but I was going about it in a very carefree manner.” 

“Now, this is a feeling that I’m beginning to rediscover as I go back to drawing and painting. It’s a period of discovery, experimentation… I feel like I am able to meander once again, just for the joy of doing things. And that is ultimately why I began photography, for the joy.”

The Signature Drop makes these two images available as a pair of posters for 72 hours only, from Friday, December 6 to Sunday, December 8 (take a look here). A new format for Magnum photographers, the Signature Drop gives each participating artist the chance to select images from their archive, take them back to their studio, and hand-finish them either with drawings, notations, quotations and each signed by the artist. Hura is the third to participate, following Newsha Tavakolian and Jim Goldberg earlier this year. 

Through the freedom that drawing and painting offer, as opposed to the documentary-like photography of his past, Hura has found a new medium to communicate, one in which he is free to experiment, taking us back to the notion of “sculpting images into existence,” as he describes in the book. “Sometimes people are confused by me, by the fact that my style is constantly changing. But for me, ’style’ brings me back to what Bruce Lee said — ’Don’t get set into one form, adapt it and build your own, and let it grow, be like water,’” he explains now. “When I started out, I felt like I couldn’t limit myself to one style. As a human being, I was talking, conversing with different people about different things and it would feel very robotic to say the same things in the same manner all the time.”

“I wasn’t in a good place when I was working on Life is Elsewhere,” he confesses. “I was looking at things through a very surreal lens, trying to find a way to escape the real world. Now, I’m in a much more joyful place, and it’s much easier for me to look at feelings like melancholy.” 

Using gouache has led Hura on a journey to understand color, learning about color combinations, the emotional tendencies of color and what they represent to us. “It’s like a different register,” he explains, comparing it to adding a sound cut to a film — another layer to his practice. In The Cat That Tried to Run Away But Was Found and Taken Home the scene is transformed into a dream-like setting through the use of color, with an acid green sky, illuminated gold stars, and a stark black, or almost deep violet. But none of it feels out of place — there is an air of realism despite the abnormal color combination.

“Photography is so different. It’s myself looking through a viewfinder, you have to take what is in front of you. Now, with painting I am looking at the same world, but from a different viewpoint, exploring registers like color in a more conscious manner. For me, it’s about extracting the essence of something — a feeling, a moment, a space, and concentrating it in a painting,” he describes.  

“I’ve had moments of hiatus in photography before, and I’m curious to see how I will go back to it with the experiences I’ve had through drawing and painting,” he concludes. “A lot of what I’m working on now is a direct result of my experience in photography — not about the photographs as such, but more about how I see the world. I feel like photography taught me how I see the world, and now I’m able to see, and to search, which has opened up language in so many ways.” 

Available this weekend only, Hura’s diptych represents both an ode to the common cat and, on a more personal level, a rediscovery of joy in artistic practice. For us, these posters act as a gentle reminder to meander, to play, and to remain curious in the busy world that we live in.

Shop Hura’s exclusive and time-limited Signature Drop on the Magnum Online Store, available until Sunday, December 9 only.