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Author : Sohrab Hura

Sohrab Hura

Sohrab Hura

by: Sohrab Hura
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.
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