Still from Bittersweet by Sohrab Hura
Single-Channel Video, Two-Channel Audio, 13:38 minutes, 2019
Within Sohrab Hura’s varied photography practice, we often find ourselves faced with flashes of intimacy. In each image there is a spark of a moment that gets to the murky centre of things. We may not get to know the subject in their entirety but a frisson is certainly felt.
Hura hasn’t looked at anyone with such intensity as his own mother, around whom he has made two photobooks, a video, a sound work, and more. In some ways, she is the closest ‘other’ to the photographer. Entering the orbit of their family home as a photographer meant attempting to negotiate the place of the photographer in the world. “To photograph my own life, I needed to put myself in a vulnerable place … One of the motivations to look inwards was also to earn my right to look outwards,” Hura has said in an interview referring to the process of showing how their lives came to be shaped by his mother’s paranoid schizophrenia and confronting the shame and anger that came with it.
In Bittersweet, Hura uses images from a 10-year period that also documents his mother’s relationship to their dog, Elsa. They are set to music generated by a programme converting the tonalities of the images into sound. Throughout the 14-minute piece, we return to the confines of the bedroom, and witness moments of rest and play, malaise and recovery—all of which Hura once tried to escape by becoming a photographer but eventually returned to in order to contend with the power a photographer holds. Beyond these negotiations, Bittersweet is tender and taut and tinged with grief.
...Within Sohrab Hura’s varied photography practice, we often find ourselves faced with flashes of intimacy. In each image there is a spark of a moment that gets to the murky centre of things. We may not get to know the subject in their entirety but a frisson is certainly felt.
Hura hasn’t looked at anyone with such intensity as his own mother, around whom he has made two photobooks, a video, a sound work, and more. In some ways, she is the closest ‘other’ to the photographer. Entering the orbit of their family home as a photographer meant attempting to negotiate the place of the photographer in the world. “To photograph my own life, I needed to put myself in a vulnerable place … One of the motivations to look inwards was also to earn my right to look outwards,” Hura has said in an interview referring to the process of showing how their lives came to be shaped by his mother’s paranoid schizophrenia and confronting the shame and anger that came with it.
In Bittersweet, Hura uses images from a 10-year period that also documents his mother’s relationship to their dog, Elsa. They are set to music generated by a programme converting the tonalities of the images into sound. Throughout the 14-minute piece, we return to the confines of the bedroom, and witness moments of rest and play, malaise and recovery—all of which Hura once tried to escape by becoming a photographer but eventually returned to in order to contend with the power a photographer holds. Beyond these negotiations, Bittersweet is tender and taut and tinged with grief.