Evening light on Howrah bridge (2025) | Sohrab Hura / Courtesy of Sohrab Hura and Experimenter
Sohrab Hura began his career in film and photography documenting social issues across Indiaand has been a full-time member of Magnum Photos since 2020. Over the years, his practice has expanded to include publishing, drawing, and writing in an ongoing investigation into the relationship between the personal and the political. Following a recent survey exhibition at MoMA PS1, he chatted with Alexandra Chaves about image-making in an age of division and digital saturation.
Alexandra Chaves: One of the most recent works displayed at MoMA PS1 features pastel drawings—a departure from the photography practice you’re most known for. How did you come to this new form?
Sohrab Hura: By 2000, I was feeling this urge to shift to something more tactile. In 2007 to 2009, I was drawing photographs that I took of my friends. I always saw it as separate from what was supposed to be “work.” It was really to have fun, not necessarily to be exhibited anywhere. I was quite attracted to the technique, sculpting an image into existence, rather than recording an image the way I used to [with photography].
During a long international flight in 2022, I ran out of movies to watch. So I watched a YouTube video [on drawing], and I was quite attracted to the person’s hands sculpting an image into existence, rather than recording an image the way I used to [with photography].
If you think about the technology of the latest cameras and of Photoshop and in-built AI, there’s a default towards a kind of “perfect image.”’ Even the cameras on smartphones already have these airbrush features. The default setting is the HDR image. I was becoming quite skeptical of that perfect image. I started thinking about the glitch, about these “broken” images that we trust more—older images that may be grainy or pixelated. You can’t quite make them out, but they draw you in because not everything is given to you. You have to be more invested in knowing if it’s true or not.
This is where the drawings come in. I was wondering if it helps in slowing one down, the time that one takes to look at an imperfect image; maybe there’s something in the softness of the drawings that also helps in disarming someone.
Chaves: Let’s talk about photography and narrative. I’m thinking of Snow (2015), which was shot in Kashmir, and The Coast (2013–2019), which I know you did over a number of years—there is a sense of narrative containment. In Timelines (2023–ongoing), you’re collapsing different timelines, mixing in minor events with major events. How did you start to think about narrative and time throughout your practice?
Hura: My parents were on a ship between Iran and Iraq at the start of the war between these two countries. It was interesting that these so-called personal timelines were overlapping with external events. The structure of the boxes [in Timelines] is one where you can fold it in different ways; you can have different flaps go in and out. So while there was a very specific combination when it was installed at MoMA PS1, in a different exhibition the same boxes could make a different cluster of storylines.
Chaves: One of the interesting interventions you make as an artist in the exhibition space is your inclusion of your handwriting. You often scrawl lines of commentary that are separate from the wall text within the gallery. Can you say more about the physical act of writing?
Hura: For almost 20 years now, I’ve used my handwriting alongside my images. Handwriting carries within it hints and gestures of hesitation and doubt—it carries a lot more than just the words. The gestures, scribbles, scratches, and erasing of handwriting brings an aesthetic gesture—but also a momentum or energy. I take for granted that anybody experiencing the work experiences it with a shield of skepticism, so what’s interesting for me is to figure out how to lay a kind of trap for the audience, make it seductive and voyeuristic. Once you’ve let your guard down, you become invested. I think about leading someone in that gentle way in Look It’s Getting Sunny Outside!!!: You first get the emotional journey of a dog dying, then it ends with my mother’s letter.
Chaves: You also have a writing practice that stands apart from your photography, even in its style, which sometimes leans toward the surreal and absurd. You’ve said that your writing is for yourself, though you have used image and text together in earlier works. How did this relationship between image, moving image, and text develop for you?
Hura: In the 2000s, there was a conscious shift toward the photo essay, people doing what Eugene Richards was doing in the 1970s. I realized I was drawn to the process of writing and film because of the continuity within them, which made me look at the form of the photo essay. If you look at the photo essay, it’s almost like a film: The structure of a traditional book where you flip the pages brought a sense of movement. At the time I was already experimenting with films made up of photographs. When you have the element of movement, there’s this question of where does it go?
Editing is what allows me to shape narratives and draw multiple narratives from the same pool of images. I’ve had the luxury of editing hundreds of narratives from hundreds of thousands of images, locating different patterns across them. When you look at an archive, it’s easy to recognize the different patterns that exist within what is supposed to be one body of work: You remove one image, and the meaning changes towards something else.
By the time I came around to drawing and painting, I realized that because I’ve already had so much experience in the act of making the material and the act of editing the material, there’s a greater degree of separation between these two acts in my photography. Whereas when I’m drawing or painting, the two processes overlap. While I’m drawing, I’m editing.
Chaves: I want to talk about the figure of the mother in your work. Your show at MoMA PS1 is titled Mother, and your own mother has featured in your photography repeatedly. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia when you were 17 years old, and you’ve chronicled her everyday life and illness through images over the years.
Hura: In the beginning, I was photographing everything but my mom because I felt quite guilty to photograph my mom. Then from 2005 to 2006, I wanted to stop photographing social issues. I was aware that I was able to photograph someone else’s life, but not my mother’s life. It felt hypocritical. So I thought I would photograph my mom as a challenge to myself, to be able to earn my right to photograph someone else’s mom.
In 2009, I had to go to Europe for a photo festival, and I was asked to bring some work. That was the first time I made a book, Life Is Elsewhere. I ended up writing about how, at one time, I hated my mom for falling sick but also realized that she loved me despite everything. I had 10 copies made, and I gave the first copy to my mom. I was quite scared that what I had written would have triggered her, but then she just came up to me and gave me a hug and told me she loved it. She just said, “Thank you.”
Chaves: You’ve spoken in previous interviews about your waning belief in photography—that you once felt photography could make a difference, but you also felt guilt and responsibility around the photographs you were taking, particularly the social photography. Where do you stand on photography now?
Hura: There’s a bit of an existential crisis in photography. While I’m really enjoying drawing, a part of me feels like I should make photographs now, while I can. The credibility of an image will become so precious soon. If we think about what’s happening in Gaza today, the videos coming out of Gaza, if October 7 happened not in 2023, but in 2026, where AI imagery will be prolific, would we be skeptical? We are in the last moments where we still believe in the real.
