Sohrab Hura is one of those fascinating people who, at 40, decided to try his hand at a completely new creative medium. Traditionally a photographer and photobook publisher, he picked up some pastels and began drawing, partly as a bid to heal after a particularly traumatic time in his life. Here, Marigold Warner speaks to Hura about his pivot to draftsmanship, and what his images tell us about the online and offline world we live in.
“It’s a bit of a midlife crisis book,” says Sohrab Hura, about his first-ever collection of pastel drawings. “I guess I started growing when I turned 40, and this is what I came up with.” Elusively titled “Things Felt But Not Quite Expressed,” the book presents a series of softly-colored drawings, ranging from memes, to references to historical events and scenes plucked from Hura’s memory, imagination or experience.
“It’s like my algorithm, it’s got a bit of everything,” says the Indian photographer. “It’s got the cat and dog thing, which I secretly feel that everyone looks at, even if they’re only posting strong political voices on their platforms.”
Hura is well-known as a member of Magnum Photos, and has self-published numerous photobooks under his imprint Ugly Dog. These projects tend to explore personal relationships, his position in the world and the broader socio-political contexts of his subjects. His recent urge to move away from photography was fuelled by a chain of traumatic events in his personal life. The artist suffered from lung damage induced by COVID-19, experienced a sudden death in his family, and his father was diagnosed with a serious illness.
On top of that, Hura was becoming, in his words, “tired of photography.” In June 2022, he started drawing and experienced a tenderness in the act of sculpting an image into existence. “I realized I’d hit a roadblock with photography,” he reflects. “Apart from my own numbness, we were working in a world with so much censorship, for example. Drawing and the softness of the pastels kind of softens away that violence. A photograph can hold a fact, or evidence. A drawing can also tell the truth, in a different way.”
Hura is now working with an entirely different medium, but his latest book is not necessarily an anomaly among his published work. “It’s still a photobook of sorts,” he says, referring to the photobook as a storytelling medium in itself. Indeed, each of Hura’s projects look entirely different in terms of aesthetic style. For example “The Coast,” which explores the undercurrents of violence in contemporary India, is “enticing but at the same time repulsive.” On the other hand “Snow,” a conceptual portrait of Kashmir as seen through three winters, is meditative and gentle. “I’m interested in the frequencies of images, and those are just two different frequencies,” says Hura. Certain images are designed to provoke specific emotional or sensory responses—the colors, its texture and how the images themselves are presented. Hura sees these image frequencies as “bait”—an opportunity to subvert visual conventions.
“The visual vocabulary for this project was more influenced by how I was looking at the world… there’s going to be humor, and there’s going to be violence. It’s a mixture because when I go out, that’s what I see,” he says. As an image frequency, pastels are gentler, almost innocent, but the subject can still be violent—drawings that speak about the ongoing war against Palestine, for example, or the toppling of the Babri Masjid, a mosque that was demolished by Hindu fundamentalists in 1992.
Hura recognizes that without context, international viewers may read some of these images differently to those at home in India. “Bigoted relative,” for example, depicts two cups—one glass, the other metal—on a kitchen table. In some houses, it is common to use different glasses for tradespeople or guests from a lower caste. While we may read this image as a simple still life, Indian viewers will recognize it as a symbol of intolerance. “I like the idea that different people will take away a different reading,” says Hura. “I want the book to really invite someone to look again… And that’s the way I’m looking at it, more cumulatively, like something rolling down a hill or slope and collecting things along the way.”
There is a sense of familiarity to the book as an object that urges a closer reading. The images are hand-titled in pencil and enclosed within a squidgy foam cover—reminiscent of the kinds of family albums we’d recognize from the 80s and 90s. The medium of pastel feels nostalgic, too, perhaps one of the earliest materials we are taught to draw with. The book is Hura’s “algorithm,” but it is also a blueprint, representing the random, and at times absurd, intersections of love, violence and humor that punctuate all of our lives.