About the speakers
Sohrab Hura’s vivid, sometimes surreal photography explores his position with the world that he exists in. Though Hura initially worked through the prism of social documentary, he soon turned his strong vision inward, creating visual journals of his life and personal relationships as a means to “find his own logic”.
Hura was born on 17th October 1981 in a small town called Chinsurah in West Bengal, India. He grew up with many varied career ambitions but eventually settled on photography, after completing his Masters in Economics at the Delhi School of Economics.
His first projects, The River (a series that explores three cities along the river Ganges and its tributary) and Land of a Thousand Struggles (which followed a grassroots movement in rural India that led to an important social security act), were made simultaneously in 2005-06. Though both were made with auspicious intentions, Hura later decided to turn his back on this kind social documentary work and instead focus on issues which reflected his personal experience.
Hura’s work has been shown in exhibitions around the world. Upcoming exhibitions include The Levee at Cincinnati Art Museum, The Lost Head & The Bird at True/False Film Festival: Columbia Missouri and La Fete Du Slip, Laussane and Snow at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge UK—all in 2019. He has published three books to date: Life is Elsewhere (2015), A Proposition For Departure (2017), Look It’s Getting Sunny Outside!!! (2018) with the fourth, The Coast, being published this year.
He is currently working on a series called SNOW, which looks at Kashmir through the prism of the arrival and melting of snow across the three phases of winter.
Hura is currently based in New Delhi, India. He joined Magnum Photos as a nominee in 2014 and became a member in 2020.
Lesley A. Martin, creative director at Aperture, has edited more than one hundred books, including On the Beach by Richard Misrach (2007); Illuminance by Rinko Kawauchi (2011, reissue 2021); LaToya Ruby Frazier: The Notion of Family (2014); Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness (2017); The New Black Vanguard by Antwaun Sargent (2019); and Sara Cwynar: Glass Life (2021). She was commissioning editor of The Chinese Photobook (2015); a contributing editor to Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and ’70s (2009) and The Latin American Photobook (2011); and curator of The Ubiquitous Image (2008), The New York Times Magazine Photographs (with Kathy Ryan, 2011), and Mickalene Thomas: Muse (2016). Lesley’s writing has been published in IMA magazine, FOAM, and Aperture, among others. In 2011, she served as publisher of The PhotoBook Review, published twice a year through 2021. In 2012, she cofounded the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards and, in 2020, she received the Royal Photographic Society Award for outstanding achievement in photographic publishing. Lesley is currently a visiting critic at Yale School of Art, New Haven, Connecticut.
Alessandra Sanguinetti is known for her lyrical, softly-drawn photography that explores themes of memory, place, and the psychological transitions of youth.
Sanguinetti was born in New York in 1968, and brought up in Argentina where she lived from 1970 until 2003. Her interest in photography began aged 9 when she poured over her mother’s collection of books by Michael Lesy, Dorothea Lange and others. She studied Anthropology at the University of Buenos Aires and General Studies at the International Center of Photography.
In 1996 she began working on a series eventually titled, On the Sixth Day, which explored the complex relationship between man and domesticated animals in the countryside in Argentina. Three years into this project, she turned her attention to two nine-year-old cousins, Belinda and Guille, whose grandmother’s farm had been the subject of Sixth Day. Sanguinetti followed the two girls’ for five years, taking pictures embarked on a life long project, collaboratively photographing the two girls as they grew up and presently as adult women. The first five years culminated in a much-acclaimed monograph, The Adventures of Belinda and Guille and the Meaning of their Enigmatic Dreams (2010).
Sanguinetti is a recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship and a Hasselblad Foundation grant. Her photographs are included in public and private collections, such as the Museum of Modern Art (NY), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She has photographed for the The New York Times Magazine, LIFE, Newsweek, and New York Magazine and is currently based in San Francisco
Sanguinetti has been a member Magnum since 2007. She is currently based in California.
Martin Parr’s unmistakable eye for the quirks of ordinary life has made him a distinctive voice in visual culture for more than 30 years. Known for his use of garish colours and esoteric composition, he has studied cultural peculiarities around the world from Japan to America, Europe, and his home country of Britain. The themes of leisure, consumption and communication have occupied him for much of his career, all of which are explored with a penetrating irony. As photographer, filmmaker and collector, Parr has defined a generation.
Parr was born in Epsom, Surrey, UK. When he was a boy, his budding interest in photography was encouraged by his grandfather George Parr, himself a keen amateur photographer. Parr studied photography at Manchester Polytechnic, from 1970 to 1973. Upon graduating, he worked at Manchester Council for Community Relations for three months and then started working towards his first exhibition, Home Sweet Home, at the Impressions Gallery in York.
Parr has published over 100 books of his own work and edited another 30. His work has appeared in solo and group exhibitions around the world. Parr has also curated many acclaimed shows including Strange and Familiar in March 2016, at the Barbican, London, which examined how international photographers from 1930s onwards have photographed in the UK.
Parr has received numerous awards over the years including the Sony World Photography Award for Outstanding Contribution to Photography in April 2017, the Erich Salomon Prize in 2006 which resulted in the Assorted Cocktail show which opened at Photokina and the Baume et Mercier award in 2008 in recognition of his professional career and contributions to contemporary photography. In Autumn 2017 the Martin Parr Foundation opened in Bristol.
Parr’s major exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery opened in March 2019. He became a full member of Magnum Photos in 1994.
Jason Fulford is a photographer and co-founder of J&L Books. He is a Guggenheim Fellow, a frequent lecturer at universities, and has led workshops across the globe. Fulford’s photographs have been described as open metaphors. As an editor and an author, a focus of his work has been on the subject of how meaning is generated through association. His monographs include Sunbird (2000), Crushed (2003), Raising Frogs for $$$ (2006), The Mushroom Collector (2010), Hotel Oracle (2013), Contains: 3 Books (2016), Clayton's Ascent (2018), The Medium is a Mess (2018) and Picture Summer on Kodak Film (2020). He is co-author with Tamara Shopsin of the photobook for children, This Equals That (2014), co-editor with Gregory Halpern of The Photographer’s Playbook (2014), guest editor of Der Greif Issue 11, and editor of Photo No-Nos (2021).
Yasufumi Nakamori is the senior curator of international art (photography) at Tate Modern. In that capacity, he is responsible for organizing exhibitions and collection displays involving photography and acquiring photographs for the Tate collection.
Formerly with the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, he has authored numerous essays and four books, including Katsura: Picturing Modernism in Japanese Architecture, Photographs by Yasuhiro Ishimoto (2010), which won the 2011 Alfredo H. Barr, Jr. award from the College Art Association. His essays are included in Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945-1965 (Haus der Kunst, 2016) and Changing and Unchanging Things: Noguchi and Hasegawa in Postwar Japan (Noguchi Museum, 2019). He received a Ph.D. in the history of art from Cornell University.
Ramon Pez is a creative director & curator. His studio practice flows between London & Mexico City and focuses on stories and narrative experiments within editorial & Art projects that blend different platforms (print, digital, exhibitions). As well as that, Ramon Pez is currently driving the Art Direction of Thames & Hudson Art trade books, lecturing, and creating experimental workshops on book-making & visual narratives with several different institutions. Recently had co-founded an editorial project in Mexico called Inframundo.
The books & the magazines he made together with the Authors received numerous awards & nominations over the years, including the Paris Photo Aperture Best Photobook Award; Recontres d’Arles Book & Photo-text Book Award; ICP Infinity Award: publication; Art Directors Club Award (Colors Magazine); Best Book of the Year, Deutsche Börse Photography Award; Kreszna-Krausz Book Award; MoMA’s favorite Photobook of the Year; Photo España Book of the Year; British Book Design Awards.
His most recent projects include, among others: Santa Barbara, Diana Markosian (2020, Aperture); Agata, Bieke Depoorter, (2021, Des Palais); A History of Misogyny – On Abortion, Laia Abril (2019, Dewi Lewis Publishing); Mictlán, Joan Fontcuberta, (2020, Inframundo); Kengo Kuma My Life as an Architect in Tokyo, Kengo Kuma, (2021, Thames & Hudson); Oscurana, Antoine D’Agata (2019, Inframundo); Libyan Sugar, Michael Christopher Brown (2017, Twin Palms); Ponte City, Mikhael Subotzky & Patrick Waterhouse (2015, Steidl); The Brightest Light Runs Too Fast, Ren Hang (2014, Éditions Bessard); Afronauts, Cristina de Middel, (2013, Self-publishing); COLORS magazine (2011-2013); Yo Soy Fidel exhibition, Michael Christopher Brown (2018, Les Rencontres d’Arles); A History of Misogyny – On Abortion exhibition, Laia Abril (2016, Les Rencontres d’Arles).
