The photographer on the influence of Bruce Lee, and the importance of flexibility to his photographic approach
Sohrab Hura
"For the person that I am, I cannot afford to try and have authorship over any language over time because I don’t think I’m capable of surviving that repetition and this strong feeling within me of one’s photography being destroyed by one being a photographer has provided me a lifeline. I have to try and just survive for as long as I can."
- Sohrab Hura
Sohrab Hura was born in 1981 in the small town of Chinsurah in West Bengal, India. He grew up with many varied career ambitions, but eventually settled on photography after completing his master’s degree in economics at the Delhi School of Economics.
Hura’s vivid, sometimes surreal photography explores his position in relation to the world in which he exists. His first projects, The River (a series that explored three cities along the river Ganges and its tributary) and Land of a Thousand Struggles (this followed a grassroots movement in rural India that led to an important social security act), were made simultaneously in 2005–06. Hura later decided to move away from social documentary and instead to focus on issues that reflected his personal experience. Turning his strong vision inward, he began to create visual journals of his life and personal relationships as a means to “find his own logic.”
His work has been shown in exhibitions around the world, including: The Levee at Cincinnati Art Museum; The Lost Head & The Bird at True/False Film Festival in Columbia, Missouri, and La Fête Du Slip, Lausanne; and Snow at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge. He has published five books to date: Life is Elsewhere (2015), A Proposition for Departure (2017), Look It’s Getting Sunny Outside!!! (2018), The Coast (2019), and Things Felt But Not Quite Expressed (2024). The 2024 volume is a collection of Hura’s pastel drawings. He has recently been working on a series titled Snow, which looks at Kashmir through the prism of the arrival and melting of snow across the three phases of winter.
Hura is based in New Delhi, India. He joined Magnum Photos in 2014 and became a full member in 2020.
