My piece on Witness, in Mint Lounge:
A magnificent new photography book offers a fine-grained, harrowing engagement with Kashmir's last 30 years.
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In a recent interview, Donald R. Winslow, a veteran US photojournalist and former editor of News Photographer magazine, rued what he called the “philosophical devaluation” of photojournalism. “It used to be about the vision of the photographer you were sending...,” Winslow told The New York Times. “Now, we’re willing to accept whatever we can afford to buy from somebody who’s already there. It’s not about the caliber of the journalism or photography.”
The question of location is certainly fundamental—just not necessarily in the way Winslow presumes in his classic view from the metropole. The 200 photographs that make up the magnificent new photo book Witness: Kashmir 1986-2016/Nine Photographers were all taken in Kashmir, shot by “somebody who’s already there”. Barring one, the nine photographers grew up in Kashmir, and continue to live there or at least visit frequently. Their work, then, is precisely the opposite of the outsider who jets into the conflict zone to get a great picture: It is a fine-grained, long-time engagement with the world around them, a turbulent world of which they are themselves part.
For many of the photographers, the camera was a personal response to the harrowing times they grew up in. “In those days, when you left in the morning, you didn’t know if you would come home in the evening. I thought if I get a press card, it might save my life,” Javed Dar said at the book’s Delhi launch in February. Dar smiled broadly, but it was no joke. And what began as a strategic tactic— the press card as a way to stand out from the crowd in a landscape strewn with army and police barriers—transformed into something more deeply felt. “Pictures gave me something. When I go out with my camera I still do feel strong and powerful, like a soldier with a gun,” photographer Dar Yasin told Kak.
Of course, the life of the Kashmiri press photographer is inextricably entwined with the threat of violence. Meraj Uddin, the most senior photographer in the book, speaks of the death of a photojournalist (in a bomb attack ) in whose honour Srinagar’s Press Colony was renamed Mushtaq Ali Enclave. “Vulnerable as individuals, photographers in Srinagar began to move around in groups, with no fewer than three cars, a practice that is visible to this day,” writes Kak. Risk is the photographer’s currency, and it is normalized to the point of becoming an initiation ritual.
Soon after his arrival in Srinagar in 2009, when Sumit Dayal, who was brought up in Nepal, got beaten up by a crowd calling him “CRPF (Central Reserve Police Force) ka aadmi”, his photojournalist friends received the news with equanimity, and that brand of mordant humour one hears often in Kashmir. “Welcome to the club. Now you are officially a Kashmiri photographer,” Dar Yasin told Dayal. “What you also need is a beating from the other side, from the CRPF. Then you’ll be a full man, a photojournalist.”
Photography in Kashmir has emerged in a cultural context where there is almost no local film-making, and little space for art. Witness opens up a much needed conversation about Kashmir, including the role of creative and intellectual practice in a place so embattled. Not all the images here refer directly to the conflict. But whether we are looking at a child at an Eid sacrifice, or a watchful migrant worker bundled up in plastic during the 2014 flood, violence can never be far from our minds. In Kak’s words: “There will be blood, but in what way will you confront it on the page?”
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| Kuka Parray with his Ikhwan militia |
Meraj Uddin, b. 1959
The doyen of Kashmiri photojournalists, by 1990 he was the first port of call for all journalists visiting the state. His images act as an archive: a beret-wearing Yasin Malik at a 1986 rally for Palestine; the open-mouthed body of Neelkanth Ganjoo, a Kashmiri Pandit judge assassinated in 1989 (possibly for sentencing Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front founder Maqbool Bhat to death); and, in the image here, the militant-turned-counterinsurgent Kuka Parray, posing with his infamous pro-government militia, the Ikhwan.
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| Village boys at Yusmarg -- Javeed Shah |
Javeed Shah, b. 1967
To newspaper readers, Shah’s photographs are familiar from his years at The Indian Express and, later, Mint. Shah often composes a picture along a diagonal axis, like the one here, which makes clear how different life is for boys and girls in Kashmir. His flair for colour can sometimes produce something disturbingly elemental: His image of a watermelon, bleeding red pulp on to the tarmac after the 2006 blast at Naaz Cinema, is pure documentation and metaphor.
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| Funeral at Pehlipora -- Dar Yasin, @AP Images |
Dar Yasin, b. 1973
Yasin has worked with Associated Press for a decade; his images must feed the relentless maw of the news cycle. “He likes to think of himself as doing a job, one that he simply wants to do well,” writes Kak. And yet, as his Witness images reveal, Yasin’s work can always be read for more. The stone-throwers he captures in dramatic mid-leap have blank, masked faces—sharply juxtaposed with the angry gaze of the boy pockmarked with pellet-gun injuries. In the image above, the crimson blankets that swathe dead militants’ bodies lend their funerals a mythic air, evoking blood but also royalty and martyrdom.
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| Paramilitary soldier kicks boy -- Javed Dar Javed Dar, b. 1975
In 1992, when he was 17, Dar had a narrow escape from the army. The trauma aged his father overnight. In 2015, when Dar’s son Danish (then 17) was hit by a bullet in the leg, the shadow of the past reappeared. The image here is an example of how the constant brutalizing presence of armed men in uniform haunts Dar’s images, often seeming like automatons with their helmeted anonymity and synchronized stride. Other pictures depict violence and ruin in painterly ways: the smoke billowing behind a sad-faced woman in 2012’s After The Fire, or the blood being scooped off a Srinagar street in 2013 in After Killing Of Policeman.
Shattered glass -- Altaf Qadri
Altaf Qadri, b. 1976
A staff photographer with Associated Press since 2008, Qadri’s pictures in Witness are often composed radially, with the eye being led inwards. In Washing Of Muharram Wounds, a disparate circle is united by bloodied hands; in Funeral After A Staged Encounter, we see older men reaching out to a grieving boy at the centre; in Grave Of A Militant Commander, pheran-clad men guard the periphery while a thorny branch descends, as if to shield the grave. In the image above, the radial motif is upfront: Everyday life in Kashmir must be viewed through cracks in the windscreen, guarded by a baffled man in uniform.
Abandoned Pandit home, Rainawari, Srinagar -- Sumit Dayal
Sumit Dayal, b. 1981
Brought up in Kathmandu and trained at New York’s International Center for Photography, Dayal’s beginnings as a photographer in Kashmir could not have been more different from those of the others in this book. His images, too, locate themselves less squarely in the political domain and more in the interstices of personal and collective memory. Since 2009, when he visited Srinagar after 17 years, Dayal’s desire to recapture the Kashmir of his childhood memories has taken new shape, expressed increasingly in work with “found” photographs: from private collections, bureaucratic files, local studio pictures, as well as his own family albums. But the theme of home abides.
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Showkat Nanda, b. 1982
Nanda was 7 when police firing in Baramulla killed his teenaged cousin Parvez. Months later, in March 1990, Nanda’s 16-year-old brother Sajad joined the Jammu and Kashmir Students Liberation Front. He died in an accident while crossing the Line of Control, and Kak’s conversations with Nanda in the book elicit the family’s stored-up grief: a fiery speech Sajad once crafted; a poem their headmaster-father wrote about losing a son to a cause. Much of his work appears rooted in that personal loss: There’s a series on young boys on the run, a series on stone-throwers, another on women whose sons and husbands have disappeared.
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| Police Announcement -- Syed Shahryar Syed Shahriyar, b. 1992
“Why would I choose to have five pictures of the flood and five of Muharram in Shahriyar’s images?” asked Kak at the Witness launch. “Because I can see there is a pause—he is figuring something out for himself.” Shahriyar is a Shia, and his studied black and white Muharram images, often of women in the stillness and contemplation of grief, mark a deliberate departure from the usual goriness of Muharram depictions. Several other photographs underline the crucial place of image-making in the new Kashmir: cameraphones at a militant’s funeral, or during a police announcement, wielded as tiny weapons of the everyday.
Published in Mint Lounge, 11 Mar 2017. |
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