Sohrab Hura: Mother

MoMA PS1

Exhibition review by Zahra Amiruddin

Mother, Sohrab Hura’s first US survey, presents over 50 works spanning two decades of the artist’s shapeshifting practice. The exhibition at MoMa PS1 brings together photography, film, sound, drawing, painting, and text – shown together for the first time – to confront colonially imposed borders, the trauma of partition, changing ecosystems of the Indian subcontinent, and more. Zahra Amiruddin reflects on the fluidity of Hura’s experimental work, where memories, metaphors and histories blend to reveal the complex and multifaceted lives of images.


Zahra Amiruddin | Exhibition review | 13 Jan 2025

While sitting at my writing desk in Bombay, India, the room is engulfed by multiple musical notes resounding from videos emanating from photographer, filmmaker, and now, painter, Sohrab Hura’s digital walkthrough in New York. In this moment, the two concrete metropolises have converged via my laptop screen, as he guides the viewer through his first US survey show titled, Mother, at MoMa PS1.

The voices from the videos in the gallery space are barely discernible, but act as background scores to elongated thoughts finding a language through multiple forms. Spread across five rooms, Hura has carefully brought together the “many lives of images” that often arrive because of the existence of another. Spanning two decades of experimental practice, the viewer is invited to immerse themselves into the artist’s mind, to navigate between personal and political introspections. Even with a deeply intimate title such as Mother, Hura addresses colonially imposed borders, the trauma of the partition and the changing ecosystem of the Indian subcontinent. Here, the word Mother becomes a blanket under which harsh realities, lived experiences, vapour dreams, turmoil, humour, and history find comfort; caressed by thoughts of a resilient caregiver, blurring the lines between the artist’s and one’s own.

The viewer is first greeted by Hura’s photographic practice that laid the foundation of his future musings, making me contemplate the infinite nature of photography. Through a mere visit to the show, we are suddenly building a relationship with the artist, acutely aware of his changing styles as the years progress. For instance, the journalistic side of Hura is visible in his photographic work Land of a Thousand Struggles (2005–6) and the film Pati (2010/2020) which is based on a small, rural region of connected self-governing villages in Madhya Pradesh (Central India) which he visited on a bus tour in 2005. Over 15 years of visits, Hura’s interpersonal relationships, interactions and strong presence is felt in the visuals, as the arid, and piercing heat emits from the distant frames. What was once a lush forest, is now cracked land, desperately ploughed by its inhabitants. The protagonists are aware of Hura’s lens, coyly smiling and exchanging looks of joy – a phenomenon that is popular in a country like India, where the camera is often treated as a tool of ‘fame.’

As the years progress, in video works like Bittersweet (2019) and The Coast (2020), the awareness of the lens sheds, and Hura almost becomes incidental during the unravelling of moments. The narrative is still his, but the viewer is transfixed by the people in the visuals, often forgetting the presence of the one holding the camera. We see glimpses of Hura’s shadow in the sea or in reflective surfaces, and much like the photographer who moves through these moments like air, our eyes glide and settle on his disjointed memories. Hura’s own mother who lives with schizophrenia, emerges from the screen as if she were in the room, unperturbed by the resounding presence that a camera usually brings.

In the single-channel video from The Coast work, thousands of people sway with the rhythm of the waves, anticipating it crashing against their bodies, as they fling forward into its vastness. The film is slowed down, as if time has stretched through the eyes of the observer, who stands fixated in the crests and troughs of a dramatic sea. The animate water holds space for both, fact and fiction, as Hura emphasises the coastline as “a metaphor for a ruptured piece of skin barely holding together a volatile state of being ready to explode.”

Through the show, we share secrets with the artist, who guides us through his urgent recollections, desires and humorous encounters in framed soft pastels and gouache paintings from Things Felt But Not Quite Expressed (2022–ongoing) and Ghosts in My Sleep (2023–ongoing). They remind me of puzzles that we used to engage with as children, where we had to find an object often hidden in plain sight. Hura seems to be recording a memory but adding his own masala (spice) either in anticipation, or for sheer entertainment. Interestingly, the tactility of these memories can be felt while moving your fingers along the bookcover of Things Felt But Not Quite Expressed published by MACK which is soft, and gooey, much-like Hura’s paintings, that aren’t rigidly structured, and meander between experimentative geometries and compositions.

The balancing act between fictitious encounters and truth linger in undertones throughout Hura’s oeuvre. It almost feels like he’s playing a game of hide-and-seek with the viewer, who may or may not take his bait. Like in his video work The Lost Head and the Bird (2019), the jarring and uncomfortable images act as a parable that reflects the frenzied speed at which information –  whether real or fake – circulates on social media. The music by Hannes d’Hoine and Sjoerd creates an atmosphere of unease, and I find my breath stuck in my throat for quite a while before I remember to gulp. The video ends with a white screen, but the tension almost makes the viewer believe that there is more to come.

The mind is never quiet as we move through the exhibition, and a range of emotions find home in the recurring sound. In between silent imagery of winter-laden doorways and hidden snowballs in gentle palms, the viewer bears witness to the conflict and violence that exists in the northernmost part of the India Subcontinent- Kashmir. Despite struggles, protests, and powerful activism by its inhabitants, the land which is often referred to as Jannat (Heaven) finds itself battling for its freedom from the clutches of India, Pakistan and China since the dissolution of the British Raj in 1947. Using the melting snow as a metaphor, Hura moves away from the romanticised and highly picturesque, tourist-friendly imagery that is associated with Kashmir and instead documents the people’s gentleness, resilience and simultaneous struggle for existence. In fact I met Hura during one of his long stints in the Chillai Kalan (harsh cold) of 2018, and noticed that his approach is characterised by being present and mindful, whether with or without the camera.

Hura is a photographer who is on a quest to record, but simultaneously gets tired by the static nature of the medium. In his recent ongoing work Timelines, acrylic gesso drawings adorn each part of corrugated cardboard boxes. Much-like the show which is a labyrinth of the artist’s fragmented contemplations, the boxes change their narratives dependent on how they are placed – unfolding and revealing whispers each time. Hura isn’t interested in linear narratives, which also speaks to the elastic propensity of thought.

If the viewer is familiar with Hura’s photographs, they will notice the recurring character of The Mother – Hura’s mother – appearing and disappearing across the walls. One might even argue that this survey is truly an extension of their relationship, which has also been delicately explored in the pages of his books Life Is Elsewhere (2015) and Look It’s Getting Sunny Outside (2018). Anchored by a familial thread that would assumingly shape a lot of his contemplations, in Mother, the artist is vulnerable as well as aware. The works in the survey are suspended between past, present and an unravelling future, ensuring that while we visit Hura’s world, we are acutely aware of our own. ♦

Sohrab Hura: Mother runs at MoMA PS1 until 17 February 2025. 


Zahra Amiruddin is an independent writer, photographer and lecturer of
photography. Her areas of interest include ethnographic studies, astronomy, personal narratives, and family histories. She is part of 8.30, a photography collective of nine women working with the visual medium across India.

Images:

1-Sohrab Hura, The Lost Head and the Bird, 2019. Video (colour, sound). 10:13 min. Photo: Steven Panecassio

2>6-Installation views of Sohrab Hura: Mother. Photo: Steven Paneccasio 

7&8-Sohrab Hura, Bittersweet, 2019. Video (colour, sound), 13:48 min

9-Sohrab Hura, The green dress, 2022. Soft pastel on paper. Courtesy the artist and Experimenter, Kolkata and Mumbai

10-Sohrab Hura, Untitled from the series Snow, 2015–ongoing. Inkjet print. Courtesy the artist and Experimenter, Kolkata and Mumbai

11-Sohrab Hura, The Coast, 2020. Video: colour, 17:27 min. Courtesy the artist and Experimenter, Kolkata and Mumbai

12-Sohrab Hura, Remains of the day, 2024. Soft pastel on paper. Courtesy the artist and Experimenter, Kolkata and Mumbai

13>15-Sohrab Hura, Untitled from The Songs of Sparrows in a Hundred Days of Summer, 2013–ongoing. Courtesy the artist and Experimenter, Kolkata and Mumbai


1000 Words favourites

• Renée Mussai on exhibitions as sites of dialogue, critique and activism

• Roxana Marcoci navigates curatorial practice in the digital age

• Tanvi Mishra reviews Felipe Romero Beltrán’s Dialect

• Discover London’s top five photography galleries

• Tim Clark in conversation with Hayward Gallery’s Ralph Rugoff on Hiroshi Sugimoto

• Academic rigour and essayistic freedom as told by Taous Dahmani

• Shana Lopes reviews Agnieszka Sosnowska’s För

• Valentina Abenavoli discusses photobooks and community

• Michael Grieve considers Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler’s posthumous collaboration with their late family member 

• Elisa Medde on Taysir Batniji’s images of glitched video calls from Gaza

Photobook Conversations #4

Valentina Abenavoli

Photobook Conversations is edited by Ana Casas Broda (Hydra + Fotografía), Anshika Varma (Offset Projects) and Duncan Wooldridge (Manchester Metropolitan University). Sitting alongside the earlier Writer Conversations (1000 Words, 2023), edited by Lucy Soutter and Duncan Wooldridge, and Curator Conversations (1000 Words, 2021), edited by Tim Clark, it completes the series exploring the ways our understanding and experience of photography is mediated through exhibitions, writing and publishing.


Valentina Abenavoli | Photobook Conversations #4 | 19 Dec 2024

Valentina Abenavoli is an editor, book designer and visual artist working at the intersection of photography, video, sound and text. She has led intensive workshops on photo editing and bookmaking internationally. In 2012, she co-founded Akina, an independent publishing house producing challenging photobooks by emerging photographers. Her first photobook, Anaesthesia, was released in 2016, followed by her second book, The Harvest, in 2017. Both are part of an ongoing trilogy investigating the subjects of empathy and evil. Recently, she co-founded Neighbour, an alternative art space in Trivandrum, India, focusing on exhibitions, publishing and collaborations.

What were the encounters which started your relationship with photobooks?

When it comes to books, there’s neither a clear beginning nor an end. It’s an ongoing, evolving relationship. It wasn’t a sudden spark or love at first sight. Rather, it grew slowly, rooted in childhood, in stories, in diaries filled to the margins, in old family albums like entire encyclopaedias of strangers. Something deeper stirred within me, drawing my mind toward far-off places and revealing the beauty in life’s most ordinary details – all recorded and preserved in printed form. Books have always been the proof of lives lived. They offer a suspended moment in time, a refuge from reality, an open invitation to step into an extraordinary “other” world.

When I think of my life before working at Akina, I recall a fascination for photobooks that was raw and unshaped – an early, unrefined intuition that supported an imaginative approach without prior knowledge, in its mad and vast simplicity. I would pick up a book because of its cover or title, without knowing what to expect with each turning page. As I learned the narrative structures and rhythm of sequences, I took my sweet time with each book, and some stories, in all their complexities, would linger in my mind for a long time, unfolding in multiple serendipities and nocturnal epiphanies. It was a real pull, a magnetic one, that had been the primary subject of my thoughts for many years. That blissful ignorance is what I now miss deeply.

Many years ago, while still studying, I worked at a book fair in Torino, Italy, in a rather simple role. I was responsible for handing out microphones to writers and publishers as they took the stage. In between talks, I would slip away to wander the stalls with Federico Clavarino, who, years later, would become one of the artists Akina collaborated with. Together, we flipped through the works of Italian photographers like Letizia Battaglia, Luigi Ghirri and Mimmo Jodice. At times, we kept an eye on the clock to avoid missing the next talk, but then one of us would inevitably get lost in the spell of books – the weight, the texture, the world of a stranger offered to you as the most intimate shared space. These books were far too expensive for me, so I filched a few. It’s a good story to mark the beginning of my relationship with photobooks. There was a desire to understand the realm of these visual storytellers, using the book form to express and communicate something invaluable – an expensive magic.

In the same city, around the same time, I would often spend hours among the dust-coated wooden shelves of La Bussola, a local bookstore selling old, preloved and out-of-print titles. These books waited for someone – anyone – to come along and rescue them from the anonymity to which they were relegated. Sometimes, I think many survived years under the indifferent dust of the bookshop only to gather a new layer of dust on someone’s shelf at home. The gesture of taking a forgotten, preloved book that could be reintroduced to someone’s life, where it might one day be opened again, its pages turned by another’s hands. There was a kind of timelessness to it, a quiet, slow resistance to finitude, defying the rules of a fast-paced market, where books need to be sold out within the same year of release. The photobook selection was scarce and mostly generic, but some obscure gems I still own today were found there, on a corner shelf labelled ‘fotografia’.

When this fascination for photobooks found me, beyond the coffee table books of famous photographers whose names I never learned, there was a growing urge for independence in photography – a push against the establishment, a need to create something outside the mainstream. From the underground up. I see now the sense of rebellion that led me to want to be part of that movement of zine makers and cheaply produced books filled with loud content and honest rawness. I started collaborating with a literary agency, learning editing, publishing and marketing. But I think it wasn’t enough to simply work with books. I wanted to create the book object itself, from scratch: the design, the choice of size, paper, sequence and text. A book is more than just a collection of images or words – it has the intrinsic quality of being made by many hands, collectively contributing to different stages of creation, production and dissemination. I wanted to be part of that effort to create vessels of beauty and change.

It is an everlasting joy and a never-ending pain, my relationship with photobooks. It has its roots in intuition and surely changed my life when it began, but I haven’t yet figured out how much I’ve changed in relation to them. It used to be all I could talk about – books, books, books – and I still do, even though Akina no longer publishes, and I no longer stand on stages, advocating for space and support to experiment with new ways of expanding the market beyond its bubble. I’m just quieter and more specific about it now, which seems to go well with age.

What is your process for arriving at decisions about books and the projects that you undertake?

As a publisher, I was once drawn to photographic projects that required courage, often tackling controversial or thought-provoking subjects. I was keen to engage with works that had the potential to spark conversations, provoke complex social dialogue, or explore political and existential themes. If the visual narrative was compelling enough, I believed that words weren’t necessary in the book. But both the market and I have changed since then. What excites me most today are projects that embrace interdisciplinary approaches, where photography is one part of a larger composition – often working alongside text, illustrations or video stills. In this context, the book itself becomes a form that embodies connections between disparate elements. Each spread follows the next, creating both linear and non-linear relationships between subjects, objects, actions, places and time. These parallel narratives, and the potential meanings they carry, are familiar to us and can be part of a larger scope, like a symbiotic root-like system of interconnections.

The concept of the “third image” created by the juxtaposition of two images placed side-by-side is that inexplicable mental image that words cannot express, yet it’s something we all understand and discuss when reading, teaching or analysing photobooks. Being by contrast or by accumulation, this is a catalyst for endless possibilities and effects. It reflects a state of being mutually dependent, not only in the natural world but across different disciplines as well. It speaks to the emotions we give and receive, the long-term use of knowledge, and the process of unlearning in order to learn again. It really highlights humanity’s complex relationship with both the known and the unknown. And in this sense, the more we look at the world in an interrelated way, the more we can deepen our sensitivity to various subjects and towards each other.

There is a clear need to bridge the gap between art practices and academic research, as both fields can benefit from each other’s insights. We are too accustomed to thinking, working and acting within the photography niche, but by doing so, we often tend to congratulate each other’s results without truly challenging the way photography can serve as a carrier of meaning. If we are curious about humanity, we would only benefit from collaboration, which allows us to better contextualise knowledge beyond specific areas of study.

We often formulate projects based on our imagination and speculation, and I am deeply fascinated by this potential, by the process itself. I like to linger in the urgency of ideas that provoke thought with no immediate purpose other than offering alternative perspectives. I like the aftermath of creation, when the work becomes at the service of an audience to be dissected, interpreted, carried forward in any iteration possible.   

Over the years, I’ve come to realise that a new model of the art world is needed, one that challenges the individualist culture of authorship and creative production. I prefer to engage in works that are rooted in collective experience and that are participatory. This is where my interest in collaborative authorship began – where books and exhibitions are the result of dialogues, negotiations and exchange, and where there’s a certain acknowledgement of the new forms projects have taken, emerging from a shared creative responsibility of multiple voices. Artists, writers, designers, curators and editors add layers of meaning, context and interpretation of the work, making it a complex and dynamic entity beyond the purely artistic expression. It is within this space of mutual influence, where roles and responsibilities intersect, where I find the greatest creative potential to break down the hierarchies in the art world and maybe create a more sustainable model for all.

I think moving to Kerala, India, and working primarily with artists and institutions from the Global South for the past five years, has given me a different perspective on what collective narratives can achieve. This shift from the individual to the collective requires rethinking agency itself, recognising that personal stories are always entangled with larger social, political and economic forces. It means moving beyond isolated experiences to examine the structures that shape them. There’s a need to decolonise our understanding of stories and power, and I believe this will always shape my collaborations moving forward.

How do you like to work with people?

Meaningful conversations are the foundation of how I work with artists. I believe that truly listening to someone’s story is essential in my role as both editor and designer. I like to be convinced, questioned and challenged. Serving the potential of the work, bringing forth everything that is yet to be said or seen. This requires not just a deep understanding but also a healthy mix of empathy, respect and imagination to translate these works into book form.

Trust is built by being open to each other’s vulnerabilities. There was a time when conversations with artists were so visceral and emotional that hours would pass without eating or sleeping, leaving my mind on fire. I’ve only recently learned the importance of saying “no” and setting boundaries. I experienced complete burnout once, and it took me two years of healing and rest to be able to absorb what an artist wanted to share and to help them navigate the book form again.

Now, I’m much more selective about the projects I take on. Becoming a mother gave me a new perspective. The urgency I once felt to engage with every intriguing project has shifted. Now, I weigh not only the potential impact of a project but also how it aligns with my current priorities – mental health being one of them. There’s still a bounce of ideas and shared vulnerabilities, but it’s a slower, more considered process.

How do you balance choices between working with highly specific materials or processes, and the desire for access?  

My practice began with a clear focus on balancing specific materials and processes with accessibility. In 2012, we at Akina started printing and binding handmade books at home, inspired by zine culture as a revolutionary, accessible way to spread ideas. Without funds for offset printing, we explored new approaches to both content and form, collaborating with emerging photographers. We managed to get trial machines twice, and published four zines and two books in editions of 100 to 200 copies each, paying only for the paper. London, at the time, was alive with creativity, and we had the support and courage to leave stable jobs for counterculture.

Over the years, we produced handmade books in two editions – a standard and a collectible edition – at prices people could afford (£8 to £12 for the standard edition, £35 to £50 for the collectible). All the books sold out within a very short time, leaving us often with a backlog of production and long nights spent surrounded by obscure vinyl records, managing humidity in perpetually damp London and stacks of paper covering every inch of our space.

The idea was to meet the needs of both collectors and those who wanted to be part of the community but couldn’t usually afford expensive books. It was our way of addressing the divide we saw in the photobook market, where books either became collectible and expensive or were inaccessible to many artists and readers. It was also the proof that limitations – being money or materials – can really help creativity to strive, instead of containing it.

Large companies reach broader audiences with offset printing, lowering costs and benefiting from wide distribution while producing high-quality books. However, I never worked with distributors, and staying independent and sustainable was challenging. Eventually, we decided to shift to offset printing as demand grew, but in doing so, the books seemed to lose their intrinsic value of being unique. That was when it stopped being fun and transformed into something more rigid – a business governed by profitability frameworks. Although I partnered with a visionary printer in Istanbul, Ufuk Sahin, known for his ability to challenge the impossible, creativity can become subject to the pressure of meeting market demands. This leaves less room for failure when the investment is too high. I don’t have the answers. Ultimately, I closed my publishing house after eight years and many books produced. 

What do you think is the significance of the shift towards the book as an object?

It’s the tactile experience, the quiet moment of slowly unfolding someone else’s work in a sentimental manner. In a world that’s increasingly digital and ephemeral, the book is an anchor, a testament, an act of resistance. When one begins to notice how a book feels, and makes a ritual out of it – picking it up, running the fingers over the cover, that first crack of the spine, the smell of the ink on the paper, the whole experience of reading becomes an encounter with its own physicality. It slows you down, draws you into its pace, and invites you to stay for a while. The book becomes a place, almost, one that you inhabit for a time. And what a profound, enduring form of communication it becomes – tangible, intimate and moving – capable of being disseminated while resisting the passage of time.

Anaesthesia, the work I am most attached to, asked to be a book from the very beginning. It emerged from a profound personal struggle, fuelled by anger at the Western bias of empathy towards the Middle East – a bias that has perpetuated the dehumanisation of certain populations, shaping cultural narratives and influencing perceptions for decades. The choice to work on a book – densely black in its form – was the most visceral reaction to a world of violence and indifference. In exploring how reality is documented, shaped and presented to us, the book poses a fundamental question: if we’ve been overwhelmed by images of horror and war, becoming numb to the suffering of others, how will we choose to respond? Through the way the images and words are placed in the book, I wanted to invite others to feel, to pay attention, and to have radical positions towards humanity. Now, one year into the ongoing genocide in Palestine, on the verge of a much larger escalation, we are still bearing witness to our collective history, we are still challenging the false narratives. That book is a small testimony.

What is the place of language and writing in a book of photographs?

I’ve always loved the freedom that lingers at the edges of the image, outside of the frame. It is where the reader is really able to imagine. When words are offered, language becomes at once illuminating and restraining. The writing evokes what is not immediately visible. It guides, suggests, hints and eventually offers a way to begin, without ever telling you how to end. But also, words can impose. They can point to specific narratives, excluding, in part, the infinite possibilities of imagination. On the other hand, words that are not descriptive, and that generate abstract meanings, can create a beautiful tension, where text and image subvert each other’s autonomy, pulling in opposite directions – one towards specificity, the other toward openness.

An intellectual controversy that has accompanied photography since the beginning is whether it can be defined as a form of language. I’ve often thought it is reductive to classify it this way, and I believe its unreliability as a form of language is one of the reasons why contemporary photography often relies on archetypal symbols, such as an isolated house in a bare landscape or hands holding something (or each other). These are simplistic, symbolic representations used to convey meanings of relationships, of belonging, of loss or identity, but they are not arranged in a systematic structure, which leaves them open to a certain simple interpretation without offering the precision of language. Many might disagree and argue that this approach opens up the ambiguity of photography for viewers who lack visual literacy. Words allow for precise and systematic communication, yet they also leave room for ambiguity due to the absence of a precise visual representation. On the other hand, when images are overly symbolic, they offer a clear visual representation but lose the ambiguity inherent to the photographic medium. I am looking at that isolated house, and I cannot imagine another type of house, which, in itself, reduces the interpretative imagination.

I believe the only way to resolve this dilemma – and to elevate the photobook market to the same level of prominence as written books – is to make visual literacy a common subject, continuously and at every age, in every educational institution. To be more mindful about the current world as it is represented in images. Because art asks for a dual engagement: a visual one and an intellectual one. And too often it leaves out those less familiar with the other “language”.

Who have been the models or templates for your own activities?

In many parts of my life, I can trace exactly where it all began – the contexts in which I gathered each facet of the person I’ve become, the moments when decisions were made, who stood by me, and who drifted away. It’s like a vivid map made of memory lanes and sentimental journeys, and I cherish every turning point, each past version of myself. There is a series of consequential events, and connected people, that have led me here, now, in Trivandrum, with my partner Joe and our son Eli.

It was 2015 when I met Sohrab Hura in Arles for the first time. He is not only an incredibly talented and considerate artist but also a reliable friend who has this unique ability to connect like-minded people. With a short and precise email, he introduced me to the wonders of Nayantara Gurung Kakshapati, the founding director of photo.circle, Photo Kathmandu and Nepal Picture Library. It took a year and a half before I could finally meet her in Kathmandu, and we spent a full week in one of the most immersive and life-changing workshops I’ve ever run. I have pictures of the students editing at 4am, with book cover cloths wrapped around our heads like veils. After that week, we began calling each other “mama”. I believe it was love from the start, but also the joy of finding that our complementary skills allowed us to create something powerful together.

Nayantara’s work is about the transformative power of visual storytelling – not just as art but as a force for social change. Together, with a growing team who feel more like family to each other and to me, she’s shown how photography and visual media can empower communities to reclaim their own stories. These aren’t just acts of creativity, but acts of rebellion against dominant narratives. What makes their approach special is that it’s about building systems that nurture relationships and spark long-lasting dialogue. It challenges the status quo, drawing from indigenous knowledge to reframe ideas of inclusivity and equity, using art, ecology and political stands as collective tools for change.

In 2018, during my artist residency for Photo Kathmandu, I stayed at a guesthouse in Durbar Square in Patan. Every morning, the temple bells would wake me at 5:30am, and from my window, I’d watch people of all ages and backgrounds interacting with the exhibition The Public Life of Women. It was surreal – people staring, reading, commenting on archival images of women who made history, all before dawn. It’s unimaginable to have such public engagement in the West at that hour, let alone one that addresses themes of gender and society. It made me question who we create art for and why.

I find myself thinking often about the present – about what role I have in our community, and how deeply Nayantara and the photo.circle family have inspired me. My mind drifts to Neighbour, the space Joe and I are about to open here in Trivandrum. It feels like the necessary next step, an extension of everything I’ve learned and believed in as an artist, a publisher, a designer, an educator and as a witness to current times. Neighbour is the combination of books, art and coffee, basically what makes my everyday. It is a reflection of our hope to engage with the world through the act of gathering, of being present with one another. I hope we can become a catalyst for change – however small that might be at first in our neighbourhood – where conversations can have that imaginative narrative, and books and art can push boundaries, challenge perceptions and ask difficult questions.♦

Further interviews in the Photobook Conversations series can be read here


Photobook Conversations is edited by Ana Casas Broda (Hydra + Fotografía), Anshika Varma (Offset Projects) and Duncan Wooldridge (Manchester Metropolitan University). Sitting alongside the earlier Writer Conversations (1000 Words, 2023), edited by Lucy Soutter and Duncan Wooldridge, and Curator Conversations (1000 Words, 2021), edited by Tim Clark, it completes the series exploring the ways our understanding and experience of photography is mediated through exhibitions, writing and publishing.

Images:

1-Valentina Abenavoli © Joe Paul Cyriac

2-Yusuf Sevincli, Oculus (Galerist and Galerie des Filles du Calvaire, 2018)

3-The Public Life of Women: A Feminist Memory Project (Nepal Picture Library, 2023)

4-Sayed Asif Mahmud, Marta Colburn and Jessica Olney, Bittersweet, A Story of Food and Yemen (Medina Publishing, 2024)


1000 Words favourites

• Renée Mussai on exhibitions as sites of dialogue, critique and activism

• Roxana Marcoci navigates curatorial practice in the digital age

• Tanvi Mishra reviews Felipe Romero Beltrán’s Dialect

• Discover London’s top five photography galleries

• Tim Clark in conversation with Hayward Gallery’s Ralph Rugoff on Hiroshi Sugimoto

• Academic rigour and essayistic freedom as told by Taous Dahmani

• Shana Lopes reviews Agnieszka Sosnowska’s För

• Valentina Abenavoli discusses photobooks and community

• Michael Grieve considers Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler’s posthumous collaboration with their late family member 

• Elisa Medde on Taysir Batniji’s images of glitched video calls from Gaza

Top 10

Photobooks of 2019

Selected by Tim Clark

An annual tribute to some of the exceptional photobook releases from 2019 – selected by Editor in Chief, Tim Clark.

1. Long story short
Fraenkel Gallery

Long story short sees San Francisco-based Fraenkel Gallery return to publishing. Coinciding with the current exhibition marking the gallery’s 40th anniversary, this book is an endlessly rich slice of 180 years of photographic history. It aims to convey “that visceral sense of experiencing a work of art for the first time, in ways that defy words.” With a taste for the eclectic, it certainly delivers. Enigmatic photographs, such as the anonymous Untitled [Dinosaur Balloon], November 25, 1969 cover image, ricochet against immediately recognisable images from some of the medium’s stalwarts – Berenice Abbott, Man Ray, Katy Grannan or Eadweard Muybridge to name but a few – all continuing to entrance, all brought together in a celebration; not only of Fraenkel’s anniversary year, but to also retune our attention on the pleasures and rewards of sustained looking. With its sumptuous printing and lavish production values, Long story short is a joy to behold. A door to the heart of a gallery that has done so much to contribute to the culture, study and appreciation of photography as an art form in the United States and beyond.

2. Salvatore Vitale, How To Secure A Country
Lars Müller Publishers

As a case study to consider critical global issues, such as borders and immigration, Salvatore Vitale’s How To Secure A Country promulgates a timely and deeply-layered look at 21st century statehood. Edited with Lars Willumeit, this long-term visual research project – as opposed to an investigation of a ‘closed’ topic – deals with the machinations and protocol of security systems in Switzerland, a country widely regarded as one of the world’s safest. The work is organised into visual clusters to reflect the collaborations with individuals from different disciplines and via access granted by various institutions, both public and private, including those relating to borders and customs, cybersecurity, data centres, armed forces and even weather forecast and supercomputering. How To Secure A Country offers a privileged perspective and multi-vantaged point of view on the fraught relationship between individuals, power and state control, yet never through images that are self-explanatory, nor without pronouncing judgement. In Vitale’s work there is always space for the viewer.

3. Lisa Barnard, The Canary and The Hammer
MACK

Another book of first-rate intelligence is Lisa Barnard’s Canary & The Hammer, spanning four years of photographic work shot across four continents. The artist’s third monograph takes gold as a subject – its complex history, relationship to wealth accumulation and symbolic representation – to demonstrate its myriad of uses and ubiquity in modern life. Deftly combining image, text and archival material within a structure of seven chapters, Barnard’s project embraces a fragmented narrative as a metaphor for our dissonant and uncertain times. Overlapping disparate yet related stories, ranging from the 1849 Gold Rush or activities by Peruvian mining organisations to jewellery manufacturing and high-tech industry, hers is a larger vision comprised of systems, contradictions and affects, ultimately cognisant of capitalism’s proclivity to both exploit and self-destruct. Throughout her career, Barnard has rigorously tested and questioned parameters within contemporary documentary practice, all the while reflecting on photography’s ability to render visible such vast and seemingly unimaginable themes.

4. Masahisa Fukase, Family
MACK

It’s a swell time for reprints of photobook masterpieces. And MACK has been leading the way in recent years. Amongst its latest have been Larry Sultan’s Pictures From Home and Alec Soth’s Niagara, and now comes Family by giant of Japanese photography, Masahisa Fukase. First released in 1991, and the artist’s final book, the project centres on a series of group portraits showing Fukase and his relatives in the family’s professional studio that were shot over nearly two decades. Family utilises the ritual of the family portrait but subverts it by featuring various nude or partially dressed women, many of whom are young performers or student actors bearing no relation to the family. Melancholy is piled on melancholy in these photographic gestures of commemoration. Touching on issues of memory, empathy and dispersal, it reflects what Geoffrey Batchen has referred to as “the desire to remember, and to be remembered”. And as Tomo Kosuga notes chillingly in his parting words to one of the book’s essays, Archiving Death: The Family Portrait as a Site of Mourning: “As we meet their staring eyes, we may feel that the process of the mourning vigil, conducted around the Fukase family, is taking place within ourselves.” File under: ‘essential titles’.

5. Hassan Hajjaj, Hassan Hajjaj
RVB

As the eponymous title suggests, this is a book about the vibrant Anglo-Moroccan artist Hassan Hajjaj – his creative universe, unique visual language and cultural remixing – that provides a noteworthy contribution to this year’s offerings. Remarkably this is Hajjaj’s first major monograph, produced to accompany the recent retrospective at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris. It draws upon his signature colour work that so effortlessly and promiscuously straddles modes of documentary and fashion photography. It also reunites this with hitherto unseen black and white work. His is an approach to studio and street portraiture that harks back to the traditions of Malick Sidibé, but which is given a contemporary twist through the bricolage of high and low cultural references in order to shine a light on the louche of global consumerism. The book’s design perfectly augments the content of the imagery by drawing out the repeated motifs and all-over compositions in an explosion of patterns and visual textures. Pluralism and new signs of recognition are the order of the day.

6. Anastasia Samoylova, FloodZone
Steidl

Necessary images from the frontiers of climate emergency in the southern United States make up this brooding exploration of the people, spaces and surfaces existing in preparation of its onslaught. Rising sea levels and hurricanes threaten but it’s the absence of any drama or action that defines Anastasia Samoylova’s FloodZone. Instead, as individuals wait and look on, conjured is an atmosphere akin to a mood piece laden with suspense and foreboding. Through a skilful blend of luscious imagery, encompassing lyrical documentary photographs and black and white studies – by turns staged and spontaneous – along with epic aerial views, and touching upon issues of paradise, tourism, decay and renewal, FloodZone constitutes an inventive addition to the slew of recent approximate visions of the Anthropocene. As David Campany notes in the monograph’s essay, “Paradise is as photogenic as catastrophe.” And while “the seductive contradictions of a place drowning in its own mythical image” is indeed embodied, Samoylova’s is a fantastic double vision, proffering depictions that oscillate somewhere between the already seen and never seen.

7. Karla Hiraldo Voleau, Hola Mi Amol
Self Publish, Be Happy Editions and ECAL/University of Art and Design, Lausanne

Readers of 1000 Words will recall the recent magazine feature on this highly-original monograph. Within it, French-Dominican artist Karla Hiraldo Voleau has made it her business to take us on a journey through her personal history in Hola Mi Amol, one that burrows into her dual heritage, its influences and prejudices. As a child Voleau was often warned to treat Dominican men with suspicion, ergo the slightly leery title of this book project, and here she returns to the island of her youth to actively seek out those very individuals she was warned about. A cast of nude or partially-dressed men populate the photographs – seen at the beach, in homes and motels or riding on the back of motorbikes via selfies with the artist – in images that both resist the admonishments of her family and, by natural extension, play us as viewers on a meta-level. Combined with text extracts, Voleau’s intersections call into question ideas of authenticity and ambiguity in the narration of the artist’s various encounters. Hola Mi Amol speaks through the most personal and private experiences relating to eroticism, prowess and racial identities. Ultimately the male gaze has in effect been turned on itself to powerful, and at times beguiling, effect.

8. Sohrab Hura, The Coast
Ugly Dog

Blood splatters, smoke bellows, tattoos sore, rats cower, tears fall – the visual experience of leafing through Magnum photographer Sohrab Hura’s fourth monograph The Coast is akin to a feverish dream. Chosen by the jury of Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation Book Awards as Photobook of the Year, there is something clearly so captivating about The Coast. And what’s interesting eventually winds up beautiful too. Opening with an absurd short story of a woman named Madhu, who has quite literally lost her head, the tone is set for an intense and unrelenting narrative that Sohrab relays in twelve varying iterations. It features photographs taken up and down the Indian coastline that work in service of what the artist refers to as “a metaphor for a ruptured piece of skin barely holding together a volatile state of being ready to explode.” Images are printed full bleed with only a narrow white gap creating a continuous visual flow – or assault – while their shifting contexts furnish our gaze onto a disorientating post-truth world, particularly in a country where disinformation and acts of violence are on the rise. Reality teeters between fact and construction in this fable for the times.

9. Amak Mahmoodian, Zanjir
RRB Books/IC Visual Lab

“This book is a conversation imagined between the artist Amak Mahmoodian (1980-present) and the Persian princess and memorist Taj Saltaneh (1883-1936).” So reads the preface to Zanjir, a riveting book hot off the press by Bristol-based, Iranian-born Amak Mahmoodian. What unfolds through sequences of quiet photographs – both authored and appropriated from the Golestan archives in Tehran – is a moving meditation on the actuality of having one’s family based there but no here and the hybrid experience of living between cultures, lands and languages, all bound up in sensations of love, loss and longing. From the subtle gaps between recording and not forgetting emerges this deeply poetic look at the vestiges of the past as they move into the present only then to become the past again. Time, memory, dreams and their inevitable decay approach something so powerful as it relates to the homeland. Mahmoodian, by her own admission, has created “a life of memories” swaying between presence and absence. With a stellar team of editors including Aaron Schuman and Alejandro Acin, Zanjir is a personal and rich foray into the imagination of an understated and poetic artist.

10. George Georgiou, Americans Parade
Self-published

This is the kind of photography that renews a feeling of wonder every time we gaze upon its imagery. Here, we are witnessing the theatre of life as seen through the parade of Americans during 2016, the year Donald Trump came into office and when the country had revealed its profound fractures. George Georgiou’s black and white photographs show one community after the next in a project spanning 24 cities across 14 states. Crowds of various sizes are captured via a simple but effective approach of photographing wide and from a distance to form tableaux-style images, their constancy bestowing a feeling of detachment but also one of acute observation. Revelling in the abundance and complexities of individuals who make up group identities, it is almost as if Georgiou is invisible – such is the candour. In these instances, people never stare down the camera, but instead focus on something beyond the frame. And they resonate with us, so pressingly that we look for ourselves in them. As we scrutinise the minutiae in such detail, images within images emerge, resolving into a kaleidoscope of mini portraits that are full of contemporary trappings. It thus offers up a valid document; in the same way the various locales reflect the socio-economic disparities of the United States to speak volumes of the environments in which the photographs were taken. Something must be said of the book’s quad-tone printing and its importance in revealing the sumptuous detail of the scenes, which, combined with lay-flat binding, allows viewers to really enter the imagery: exquisite.


Tim Clark is a curator, writer and since 2008 he has been Editor in Chief and Director at 1000 Words. 

Captions:

1-Eadweard Muybridge, Contortions on the Ground1887. (Long story short, Fraenkel Gallery)

2-Salvatore Vitale, A customised assault rifle transformed for sport purposes, from the series How To Secure a Country, 2014-18.

3-Lisa Barnard, Gold-miner Kimberly, at the Las Vegas Gold & Treasure Show, 2017, from the series The Canary and The Hammer.

4-Masahisa Fukase, from the series Family, 1971–89. Courtesy Michael Hoppen Gallery, London, and Éditions Xavier Barral, Paris.

5-Hassan Hajjaj, Keziah Jones, 2011. Courtesy Vigo Gallery, London, and Taymour Grahne Gallery, New York.

6-Anastasia Samoylova, Park Avenue, 2018, from the series FloodZone. Courtesy Galerie Caroline O’Breen, Amsterdam.

7-Karla Hiraldo Voleau, from the series Hola Mi Amol.

8-Sohrab Hura, India, 2014, from the series The Coast. Courtesy Magnum Photos.

9-Amak Mahmoodian, from the series Where Time Stood Still.

10-George Georgiou, 4 July Parade, Ripley, West Virginia, 04/07/2016, from the series Americans Parade.