Committing a Photographic Act: Rooftops by Sohrab Hura

(Photography artist Sohrab Hura)

Photographs do lie; but there was a time when they never lied. Written words and clicked moments were the evidences of truth. Chances were less in manipulations on analogue photographs and if at all a few multiple exposures and long duration exposures were done one could really look for the evidences of such manipulations within the results. To unravel many a murder mysteries photographs came to be the ultimate evidences. Michelangelo Antonioni’s movie, ‘Blow Up’ (1966) is one such murder mystery and in 1954 itself Alfred Hitchcock had made ‘Rear Window’ with a photographer using his camera to fix a murderer in the next apartment. Most of the possible experiments had been done in the early days of photography and the culmination of which we see in the movie titled ‘Man with a Movie Camera’ (1924) directed by Dziga Vertov. The symbiotic relationship between still photography and moving photography/cinematography helped them develop techniques to dazzle people with tricky visual results during the pre-computer days.

(from Sohrab Hura's Rooftop Series)

However, in the post-computer and present digital days a photograph is the last evidence that could say some truth. Photographs register a reality but with a perspective chosen by the photographer. It has always been so but the early innocence of the image maker using a mechanical device with a chemical coated surface was fundamentally different from the ideological positioning of the present day photographers. Each person equipped with a smartphone is a potential photographer who could at times produce better photographs than a professional photographer could. Today, photography is, done by a photographer is a responsibility for he or she does or commit a photographic act. It is as good as committing a deed, showing commitment to a point of view, which is liable to be seen in various mediums with or without manipulations. That makes the committed photographer an absolutely different personality from the innumerable camera holders in the world. When the veracity of an image is suspected due to manipulations, only the truth value underlined by the photography artist could stand evidence to the truth within the image.

(from Sohrab Hura's Rooftop Series)

 

Seen against this context, each photograph that appears in the social media, print media and any other mode of communication has a doubtable authenticity and an authentication certificate coming to the viewer in terms of the photographer’s history and commitment. Sohrab Hura is one such photography artist who is has been committing the act of photography against the normal more of manipulations. His works are highly acclaimed and credited in major photography agencies like Magnum and British Photography Journal and so on. An economist by education and a photographer by choice, this thirty nine year old Delhi based artist takes photographs with a sense of critical disinterestedness. The idea of ‘bare life’ seems to be the guiding force of Sohrab. The state seems to be unaware of the kind of life that people lead near and away from its citadels but it needs these lives to be reformed through various modes of control. Bare life is the life of people excluded from the purveyance of the government; but it has its own pace and rhythms, with some ingrained potential to rebel and bring around change.

(from Sohrab Hura's Rooftop Series)

The Roof Top series of Sohrab tells it all. He looks at the buildings around him as he is locked ‘up’ in a country which is locked ‘down’. He has somewhat an advantageous position compared to the terraces that he eavesdrops with his camera. The terraces that had been once a no man’s land (sometimes plumbers go up there to do some repair or the cable guys may climb all the way up to fix a dish antenna) are now occupied by people at various times of a day and night for many different purposes. Old people come to walk around as walking down the roads is prohibited, young guys bring their dogs up there to walk. With the fall of darkness youngsters who seek loneliness sneak up to look at their mobile phones and do their private dealing there. Sohrab catches all these moments. One may think that there is some voyeuristic pleasure in the act but the more you look at the images the more you come to know that the author of the images take a neutral position (which has also an ideological stance emphasizing his neutrality based on being a true witness of the things around). The subjects are unaware of his existence at another window or terrace or balcony.

(from Sohrab Hura's Rooftop Series)

 Sohrab could be replicating the surveillance methods placed by the state at every expected corner in the society. Though that is not the real intention of the artist, he engages himself in a sort of benevolent surveillance; a registering of the facts/acts/events as they are for the posterity or for the time being, to satisfy his own need to make some images. An image is always there with or without an animated object/entity in it. But what image does a willing witness wants is another thing; he waits for some moment to appear or to click at a particular moment to extract the uniqueness of that moment. Something has happened there and what is going to happen, nobody knows. So the witnessing and registration by the photographer himself becomes a partial act which couldn’t be taken for truth or evidence. A photographer always works within this precarious discourse of meaning generated by a photographic moment/event. The presence of a person at a particular place at a given time could be misjudged towards an undesirable end for the given moment could be deceptive, a transgression from the path of the object/person. So even with the sureties of people doing mundane things on a terrace during the lockdown days, Sohrab couldn’t create an ultimate meaning. However, the socio-cultural and political context created by the pandemic seems to have given precarious yet palpable meaning ensembles that could be translated as truthful registrations of those days by Sohrab.

(from Sohrab Hura's Rooftop Series)

 

Each image created from an absolutely lonely, sad and moody space (I am just making a conjecture) by Sohrab makes an onlooker think more and more about the film ‘Rear Window’. Here James Stewart’s character, Jeffrey looks at the apartments beyond his window as if it were a landscape; he shows the same enthusiasm. He does not look for human presence or activities in particular. All those human activities are bonuses or accidental findings for Jeffrey, which eventually leads to a curious case of murder. This could be interpreted in multiple levels; a movement of human interest from the topographical fascination to anthropological specifics, that underlines Jeff’s initial interest as a transgression and later curiosity as a purpose. In another level, it has some Biblical connotations where the expulsion of human beings from the garden of Paradise takes place. Once that is done, the next is a murder; the murder of Abel. Jeff moves from the simple pleasure of viewing to the witnessing of a homicide. Sohrab’s pictures do evoke such parallels though he does not chance upon one. Many an interesting frame makes us feel the cold survey turning into a smile; exactly the one blooms in the countenance of James Stewart.

(from Sohrab Hura's Rooftop Series)

Sohrab Hura’s ‘Snow’ is another photo series that needs commendation for its literally ‘cold’ reality. Sohrab does not manipulate any single image or event to make them impressive or plain. May be anybody who opens a camera at those scenes could capture something like this; but the problem is that that opening of the camera shutter is a commitment that goes beyond the normal enjoyment of visual beauty of rural Kashmir or the exotic images culled out from there. As I mentioned at the outset, photographic act is a commitment and the images in the suite titled ‘Snow’ becomes all the more poignant especially after a year-long lockdown that the state has been facing since August 2019. Sohrab also published photobooks and writings.

-JohnyML