Six years ago, Sohrab Hura and his mother were exploring a new shopping mall in Gurgaon, India, — a city for the wealthy on the southern outskirts of New Delhi — when she caught him wistfully admiring a book of pictures shot by Magnum photographers. The doting mother took Rs2,000 (Dh122) out of her purse and promptly bought the book for him.
Last month Magnum — the globally-acclaimed photo agency owned by photographer-members who chronicle the world — inducted Hura into its pantheon of lensmen. The 32-year-old is only the second photographer from India, after Raghu Rai in 1977, to be accorded the honour many photographers the world over dream of. As Hura broke the news to his mother, memories of that day in 2008 when she had purchased what was arguably a very expensive book, came rushing back.
But what does photography, or membership of the world’s most exclusive photographers’ club, really mean to Hura who, unlike most news photographers around, grew up in the lap of luxury? “Everything”, he told Weekend Review very emphatically after Magnum elected Hura as newest nominee at its 67th annual general meeting in New York. “No matter how much I hate photography at times, I wouldn’t know what to do without it.”
His dad, a Punjabi merchant navy officer married to a Bengali who traces her roots to Bangladesh, sent him to Doon School — the cradle of India’s elite in the salubrious Himalayan foothills. And he completed his Masters in Arts from Delhi School of Economics — another bastion of privileged young men and women.
How does Hura pay his bills now? Is income from photography enough to maintain the lifestyle he is accustomed to since birth? “I still have a bed in my parent’s home. And once in a while if I’m lucky I get an assignment. It’s easy to live the way I was brought up. Expenses are little, I don’t go out much, I travel cheap, I do whatever I can to put whatever I have into my work and I manage”, he says as candidly as possible.
Hura started dabbling in photography around 2001. By 2005 he was hooked to “trying to say something” with the help of a camera. “Initially my dad was certain that I would end up with a studio for passport-size photos near our home. He would stop my friends on the road and tell them to knock some sense into my head”, he recalls.
A few years ago, while applying for World Press Photo’s Joop Swart Masterclass in Amsterdam, Hura moaned: “There can never be anything more frustrating than finding your self trapped in a room of vacuum, endlessly crashing against the different walls when all you yearn to do is to break out of the room. I’ve been trapped in this room for the last few years. Since I began photography I’ve been on a journey to find my own voice. And over the years my journey has taken different turns. But I’ve always had that constant feeling of it eluding me.”
Magnum, which has welcomed Hura to its fold, is undoubtedly the last word in photo-journalism. Formed in 1947 at a lunch table where four photographers — Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger and David Seymour — sat discussing their coverage of the Second World War, it now has editorial offices in New York, London, Paris and Tokyo for supplying photographs to the press, publishers, advertising, television, galleries and museums across the world.
Its library is updated daily with new work from across the globe. The library houses all the work produced by Magnum photographers and special collections by nonmembers. There are approximately 1 million photographs in both print and transparency in the physical library, with over 500,000 images available online covering major world events and personalities from the Spanish Civil War to the present day.
Magnum constantly updates profiles on most countries of the world, covering industry, society and people, places of interest, politics and news events, disasters and conflict. Its library reflects all aspects of life throughout the world and the unparalleled sense of vision, imagination and brilliance of the greatest collective of documentary photographers.
With justifiable pride, Magnum’s website states that “when you picture an iconic image, but can’t think who took it or where it can be found, it probably came from Magnum!” Cartier-Bresson called Magnum “a community of thought, a shared human quality, a curiosity about what is going on in the world, a respect for what is going on and a desire to transcribe it visually.”
Hours after his induction, Hura told the “British Journal of Photography”: “Olivia Arthur and Susan Meiselas encouraged me to apply. I was a bit nervous and scared about what it would mean to be a Magnum nominee, and to be out there in the photo world. I’ve been working on my own for a long time and I’ve been quite cut off from the photo scene, enjoying the freedom. But then I got lots of welcome e-mails from Magnum photographers.
“They told me to keep doing what I do, and to not change myself for Magnum. In fact, I’m trying to switch off from knowing that I got selected, so I can focus on my work. It feels like something to try out, to see if being part of something works for me. I’m quite excited because a lot of us [photographers] were inspired by and looked up to Magnum in a big way when we were growing up.”
Hura submitted around 60 photographs after he was nominated by Magnum member Olivia Arthur. Subsequently, he sent a book dummy, video and a wider selection of images “that show my entire process, from when I started to now, and how I’ve changed over the years as a photographer.
“I’m always working on four or five things at the same time that are completely different from one another in terms of the language, narrative, story and, equally importantly, the tone,” he says. “This way of working keeps me happy and is closer to who I am because I am each one of those works.
“I don’t know whether Magnum will be good or bad for me, but I hope that it doesn’t allow me to get complacent”, says Hura, whose work will be reviewed after two years to decide whether he deserves to become an associate. If he makes the grade, there will be yet another review in 2018 before he is invited to become a full member with a stake in the cooperative.
Hura bought his first camera, a Nikon FM10, in 2001, and would initially shoot one or two rolls a month. He revealed that the most expensive camera he has owned so far is a used Contax T3 paying $400 (Dh1,470) for it on eBay; it would now probably cost between $800 and $1000, he added.
He plunged headlong into photography in 2005 when he boarded a bus ferrying activists through 10 northern Indian states to garner support for the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act and Right to Information Act. The bus-ride was conceived by Jean Dreze, a Belgian-born Indian professor who taught Hura at Delhi School of Economics and has co-authored books with Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen. Hura lived on the bus for 35 days as it crisscrossed zones of medieval backwardness and grinding poverty. He photographed the wretched lives of the marginalised; the effects of hunger and deprivation on humans.
The riveting images helped Hura bag a National Media Fellowship — a grant of Rs100,000, which funded his year-long project on livelihood issues in Kalinagar — a landmark theatre of industrial displacement in Orissa. It produced Hura’s first major work — a black and white portfolio of 40-60 photographs entitled “Land of a Thousand Struggles”.
Interestingly, Hura doesn’t care much for photo-journalism “because its role has changed from the 1960s”. “It was once the prime source of documentation. With the arrival of television, there’s too much information and documentation all around; photographs die a daily death. From the way I look at it, photos needs to hit you hard in the gut.
“As far as news media photography is concerned I feel that this profession today is very restrictive when it comes to giving a photographer space to do his or her own work. Traditionally the most important photographers in India used to come from this world of news, but over the last decade or even before that the news space changed a lot and apart from a handful of photographers in the news like Sudharak Olwe and Neeraj Priyadarshani and a few others I haven’t got to see much work and I blame the system.”
According to Hura, there are “some good photographers in India like Asmita Parelkar, Ronny Sen, Arko Datta, Mahesh Shantaram, Sumit Dayal and a few more.”
What are Hura’s political views like? “I’m not really sure what they are at the moment. Earlier, I got to spend a lot of time in Jawaharlal Nehru University even though I was in Delhi University and I was quite taken in by the idea of the left, but I think after a few years I started to feel that no political view is really better than another. I mean they all have their own agendas and they all come at the cost of someone else.
“During my earlier years as a photographer I was politically very charged and believed that the left was the solution to all the problems, but I saw that there are vulnerable communities that are suffering because of both sides of the political system. So I’m not really sure where I stand at the moment.”
S.N.M. Abdi is a noted Indian journalist and commentator.
