Sophie Hur wants you to know that Australia, despite its geographic isolation, is the place to be. She understands the irony, though. Hur is a photographer who has chosen the city of New York as her subject and muse, an act that situates her in a lineage of expat photographers such as Emma Summerton and Lachlan Bailey. But she told me recently, when we finally sat down after five months of coordination, that if the right opportunity comes, she’s heading home.

Sophie Hur has had a peripatetic career in photography. She has worked for esteemed brands including Miu Miu, Nike, Instagram and Louis Vuitton. She has immersed herself in a tradition of portraiture, creating slick photographs of celebrities like Maya Hawke and Jamie Dornan. She has even dived into heady artistic waters, exhibiting personal photos of friends in a local gallery space. Her varied photography career is part of a larger quest to leave her indelible mark on the industry.

Born in Brisbane to an Australian mother and Korean father, Hur recalls attending theatre classes from the age of nine and spending eight hours a week in drama studies by the age of 15. Once she graduated high school, Hur abandoned theatre to pursue architecture. A few weeks into her new course, she discovered that her friend had been accepted into acting school in New York. Hur quickly auditioned and was accepted, making what she called a “seventeen-year-old decision” to relocate to New York.

If acting was Hur’s serpent, then photography was her forbidden fruit, her initial temptation. Hur started taking pictures in her second year of college. Her boyfriend at the time was an assistant to Steven Klein and recommended she play around with a Canon AE-1 camera. Once she completed her studies, Hur decided she had a better chance of obtaining her American visa by committing to photography full-time and photographing for magazines, musicians and brands. But she claims, in a characteristically frank fashion, “After doing a couple of jobs and experiencing ego and disrespect, I was like, no, thanks!” It was after this period when Hur decided that she only wanted to create work that she wanted to make. “Work that no one else was dictating,” she tells me. In 2018 she wrote in an Instagram caption: “I’m going to be experimenting with a new sort of style. My style is still evolving, but I think I am starting to understand the kind of work that I want to produce. I am sick of overthinking and getting frazzled with what I want to be seen as.”

At this point in Hur’s life, she recalls feeling frustrated. “I was standing in the middle of the living room asking, what photos do I want to take? What is my taste? What is my aesthetic? I was looking at the work of Petra Collins and the Le Bon brothers and thinking, what am I? What do I like doing? What feels the most me?”

The resulting pictures were by no means flawless. They were, for the most part, exactly what you would expect of a young photographer developing their style. One image portrays a semi-nude woman on the beach masked in a balaclava. There is a charming self-portrait of Hur wearing a pink wig and corset, radiating a childish petulance and budding confidence. Other photographs show friends swimming nude along rocky creeks, bending backwards against grey-coloured backdrops, and Ridgewood streets. The charm of this early work springs directly from its artlessness. These images remind us of photography’s impressionability, its power to trace our progress, mark our mistakes and instantiate our dreams.

Hur eventually developed her interest in collage. She started cutting, pasting and arranging series of photographs, colour-ing in the borders and “painting with her hands”, as though she were Jim Goldberg mapping out his book Raised by Wolves in 1995. The pictures from this period play with the principles of variety and repetition. She prints, pastes and reprints until a story naturally reveals itself. In one image captioned Highway Anxiety, the brakelights of a speeding car shimmer down the high-way, splashing the barriers with fluorescent red and orange beams. In the bottom right corner, Hur dictates in capital letters, “There are so many cars. I feel so relaxed because we are all going the same way—what is behind us.” It is in this unknown where Hur finally starts to figure out who she might be.

Hur’s commercial work has allowed her to play around with larger budgets and bigger ideas. She takes obvious pleasure in having directed Bella Hadid and Hailey Bieber and worked with Virgil Abloh in 2021 and a crew of over twenty-five people to direct an NBA × Louis Vuitton campaign. Hur feels fonder of her personal work, though. In a series of portraits, a figure looks deadpan at the camera, their pink-tinged mohawk and bleached eyebrows sliced by a post-production cut. In another, three pieces of Yan Li’s face are puzzled together so all that is left are his two eyes, ear and mouth. One of her most recent pictures, taken in transit in Tokyo, sees a girl walking up blue tattered station stairs, her feet not yet touching the ground. You get the sense Hur views taking photographs the same way a child views a game of hide and seek: as a chance to explore and play and be free.

When asked how long she thinks she will be in New York, Hur replied, “Until life takes me somewhere else.”
“It’s stimulating for you?” I prod.
“For the past two years I’ve felt pretty uninspired. It’s not like, New York anymore, but I still love living here. Every day I check in with myself and ask if it is still motivating me, and I think it is. But, if someone said, we’re going to do a project in Australia for six months, and you’re going to work as a director, I would go. Eventually, I would love to go back."

New York’s pool is vast, with schools of big fish swarming in each and every direction. The chances for success are slim; this is known. So why then, after finally establishing herself, would she ever consider leaving? “If I come back, there are so many things that could be developed. There’s so much room to grow. If you were to say to me right now, I want to take my magazine and bring it to America, I would say, don’t do that at all. It will be so much more worthwhile being in a place like Australia. You should focus on the gaps.”

Hur challenges the Australian cultural cringe, a tendency to underestimate its own potential for artistic community. While this kind of thinking initially inspired Hur to leave, it is also this kind of thinking that has shown her Australia’s possibilities. And while she might not return for some time, she knows it strength and its virtue, just as she knows her own.