Sohrab Hura | Magnum Photos Dusk. Varanasi, India. 2005.
“When I first started photographing I believed that a journey, a physical one, needed to be undertaken for one to become a photographer. I never thought why, it jus
(...) t seemed natural because of the way I must have been conditioned into photography. At that time, my mother had not been well and a river less than a thousand kilometers away had become my anchor point. It was here that I taught myself photography and it was here that I also found a sense of calm. The man in the photograph was dipping in the dusk of the river, as I lay prostrated on the ground beside him, and with each gasp of his breath the river pushed closer to me. In every ripple, time passed, and when I stood up I found myself many years later in S’s office in a city that was farther away than anywhere I had been before. She wasn’t how I had imagined her to be. The diminutive body stood slightly bent with grace because of all the weight of the world that she carried upon herself, and as she lifted me onto her giant shoulder, the Molotov Man sitting there turned to me with his smoldering eyes. From there I could see on a shelf, the name of the strange man with a beard who would start to look more like a mushroom the more I would get to know him in time. He had also made a journey along a river once and his is the only book that I have stolen in my life. I was no longer sure if the journey I needed was a physical one.”
- Sohrab Hura © Sohrab Hura | Magnum Photos
