Life is Elsewhere

Life Is Elsewhere is Sohrab Hura's first photobook, self-published in 2015 under his own imprint, Ugly Dog, as a hardcover edition of 600 signed and numbered copies.

The book is built as a journal, drawn from photographs Hura made of his mother, his family, friends and travels over more than a decade. His mother was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in 1999, when he was seventeen, and the household withdrew from the world as her condition worsened. Hura has described the resulting images as fragments that seem disconnected on their own but that he hoped would eventually piece together into a picture of his own life and his reconciliation with it. The book carries an introduction Hura wrote in 2005, years before the work was finally sequenced and printed.

Hura, based in New Delhi, is a member of Magnum Photos whose other photobooks include Look It's Getting Sunny Outside!!!, The Coast, Snow and Things Felt But Not Quite Expressed. Life Is Elsewhere is the project that established the diaristic, personal approach to documentary photography that runs through his later work.