‘I’m worried about what AI does to the trust that we have for images’: Artist Sohrab Hura on everybody being a photographer today

Your photographic work has for long dealt with sociopolitical undercurrents through personal narratives. How does that sensibility carry into a series such as The Forest?

In my early years, I’d often try to look at things ‘objectively’ and that always created a specific distance between me and the work and also the audience and the world. Everything allowed for more definite meanings. Afterwards I found it more productive to make work that would allow for leakages so that there would always be a little room for doubt for the viewer. I wanted the viewer to be able to reflect a little bit over whatever I had to say and not consider it in isolation. I felt by doing that maybe they could make my work their own. My work became more metaphorical and sometimes I also became a protagonist in some of the stories.

Snow, 2015-2019, Archival pigment print (Photo by Sohrab Hura)

For example, in my book The Coast, I refer to myself as the idiot photographer in the absurd story that I’ve written about violence and power. I was critiquing the violence that is embedded in the image infrastructure around us and it have felt very hypocritical to have left myself, an image maker, out of that criticism. But in my story, I was also alluding to the fact that the idiot photographer is all of us who are making and consuming images today.

In The Forest I’ve made paintings of scenes from one of the city forests near my home in Delhi, but I’ve also included scenes from the hospital where I’ve been spending time of late. The forest in these paintings, like many of the other landscapes and characters in my earlier photographic works, isn’t just an idyllic physical space but a fluid state of being that exists in relation to the larger world outside.

The exhibition “A Winter Summer” brings together snow and extreme summer. If you could talk about bringing these contrasting works together.

I had first photographed in Pati (Barwani) in 2005, right after completing my university studies. At the time I was looking at employment and livelihood as a core theme of my work because I had studied economics. But as time went by I wanted to foreground the everyday life of a place and people and not look at them merely as smaller parts of a larger topic. It took many years of working in the same place with the same people for me to start to look at something like the heat of summer in a place like Pati. From working thematically to then working in a more humanistic documentary tradition, I finally started to try photographing something that was more invisible, something like heat.

The song of sparrows in a Hundred Days of Summer (Photo by Sohrab Hura)

I happened to go to Kashmir in the winter on holiday at first and it felt very incomplete for me because even though I had assumed that I had gone to Kashmir, in fact I had only gone to Gulmarg and the Dal lake side of Srinagar. Upon returning it had felt very strange because all I remember from Gulmarg was the presence of tourists and the army. So I wanted to go back, but this time to places that I wouldn’t have gone to otherwise. For all the years that I returned to make photographs, I’d tell myself that I was only going there to do a recce – it was a way for me to avoid thinking of my journeys there as being part of any ‘project’. I wanted to maintain as much openness and curiosity as I could. The work Snow emerged by itself the more I visited Kashmir. That is how it is with most works that I do. I have a rough intuitive idea of where and how I want to feel about with my photographs and then I give time for the work to appear, disappear and then again reappear in various iterations until I find an anchor that feels steady.

At a time when everyone is a photographer, how is the role of photography changing?

To be honest, I don’t think we have the luxury to ponder about if everyone is a photographer or not. Today I’m more worried about the growing presence of AI and what it does to the trust that we have for images as an audience.

We also seem to have forgotten for the moment that besides the practical need to communicate, the arts are equally driven by an existential motivation that is purely human. Photograph for me has always been a residue of a much larger process, which is why I also believe that the more that AI-generated images find their ways into our lives, there will come a tipping point at which more people will start to get aware of photographs being the residues of a human process. But, for now, we have to deal with the havoc of doubt and confusion that AI will wreak upon us. In that context, if everyone is indeed a photographer today, I’ll take some solace from it.

When you look back at works such as Life Is Elsewhere or Bittersweet, do you see echoes of those emotional currents in The Forest or A Winter Summer?

Yes, in fact people who have known me for a long time, tell me that my current drawings and paintings remind them of my early works with photographs. I think it has a lot to do with meandering having been a big part of how I’d make my early photographs. I was making photographs to learn photography. I wasn’t motivated so much by a predetermined topic or agenda and there was a lot more room for curiosity. The more comfortable I got with making photographs, maybe I lost out on a bit of that looseness that meandering brings. It’s a delicate balance that I’ve wanted to find throughout my career — how to work with everything at stake but with nothing to lose.

There is obviously this direct connection to family and friends – my more personal life – that lies at the centre of my early photographic works and current drawings and paintings, but I believe that the loose meandering part of my process that I have referred to plays a role in it.

Even around 2008-09, I was writing these silly captions alongside photographs I had made of friends and travels to give them a meme like life. I was realising this other kind of velocity of meaning that a combination of words and text could generate. And then as the political spectrum around me started to shift I started to get more consciously responsive to it with my photographs and somewhere the lightness of meandering faded away because I felt obliged to make my photographs with a sense of responsibility. With drawing and paintings, I’m trying to seek out that familiar lightness and silly-ness again, so that I can survive a little longer as an artist who still feels inspired to make work.