Indian photographer captures stark life in the southern US on Magnum Photos road trip along the Mississippi
- Sohrab Hura took a road trip with two other photographers, following the Mississippi River
- His father had visited with the merchant navy, but was unable to set foot on US soil
When internationally acclaimed Indian photographer Sohrab Hura was invited to join a photographic road trip in the southern United States in 2016, he remembered a text message his father had sent him: “When you get the chance, tell me what’s beyond the levee.”
Hura’s father had sent him the message from a cargo ship that was steaming north up the mighty Mississippi River from Pilottown in the far south of Louisiana to Belle Chasse in New Orleans, about 115km (72 miles) away.
Working as a merchant navy officer, Hura’s father could not set foot on land because of stringent US immigration restrictions. Stuck on the ship, he couldn’t see beyond the massive levees, the earthen embankments that line the Mississippi to prevent flooding.
So when Hura was invited to join the photographic journey along the lower part of the river some months later, his father’s request proved prophetic.
Hura, who is based in New Delhi, has responded to his father’s request with a series of 72 black-and-white photographs from his road trip, beginning from the small town of Cairo at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers in Illinois and travelling more than 870km (540 miles) south to Pilottown, where his father’s river journey had started.
“The America I found on the way was not quite the same as the one my father had imagined,” he says.