Rooftop

In many places, the roof terrace is the usual living space that opens up to the sky and enables a perspective of the urban hustle and bustle from above. As a private retreat in the open air, it does not close completely architecturally and maintains the spatial connection to public life, which makes it lively. Roof terraces also appear in their architectural sociological significance in literature and film. Especially the overview and the view of the immediate surroundings make it so appealing. The photographer and editor Sohrab Hura created the work “Rooftop” during the lockdown caused by the pandemic in May 2020. In it he documents in a voyeuristic manner the evening pastime of his neighbourhood in Delhi. Due to the curfew restrictions, life shifted upwards during this time. Every evening – similar to a ritual – Hura searched the hustle and bustle under the sky and thus escaped for a short time the limited perspective on himself and his Barsati – a one-room apartment on the terrace, atop an old residential building in the south of the city. The vastness of the sky now seemed larger than he remembered from other times. The need for social exchange and being surrounded by other people is understandable. The photographs tell of being thrown back on the home, of isolation and being alone, as people experience it in the pandemic, and which the artist went through in a previous life phase with his sick mother, processed in his trilogy “SWEET LIFE”. Hura also draws attention to how tired our gaze is often of the familiar, which nevertheless remains changeable. As a seeing medium, photography itself intensifies the reflection on the conscious gaze.