Kashmir

Amit Mehra

Description

A chronicle of more than five years of travel and quiet observation, these images capture the lives sometimes flourishing, occasionally stilled that endure in the face of uncertainty and violence that have become synonymous with the Valley. Soldiers march in the spring tulip gardens of Srinagar; boys jump into the Nagin Lake to cool off; the afternoon sun entangles shadows on loops of razorwire barricades, in the middle of a street; and the biting Baramulla winter cloaks a dismembered doll with snow. Revealing and intimate, Amit Mehra s photographs of Kashmir are as much a conversation with the stunning beauty of the land and its people as they are an effort to engage with its multiple realities.

Sujets

• Humanities

Informations

• Publié par: Penguin Books Ltd
• Date de parution: 15 octobre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9788184756760
• Langue: English

Extrait

AMIT MEHRA
Kashmir
Foreword By Ranjit Hoskote
Contents
Dedication
Foreword: The Other Side of the Bridge
Kashmir
Acknowledgements
Copyright Page
For My Wife Manjari Chaturvedi
Srinagar, 2009

Foreword
The Other Side of the Bridge
RANJIT HOSKOTE
The image is not the duplicate of a thing. It is a complex set of relations between the visible and the invisible, the visible and speech, the said and the unsaid. It is not a mere reproduction of what is out there in front of the photographer or the filmmaker. It is always an alteration that occurs in a chain of images which alter it in turn.
-Jacques Ranci re, The Emancipated Spectator (2009) [1]
The impossible image
Any photographer who wishes to address the contemporary reality of Kashmir finds himself bound by a double chain of images: a chain that binds together two rival and mutually opposed regimes of visuality which have dominated the perception of Kashmir in India s popular imagination for a long time.
The first of these is the regime of the scenic picture postcard and the 1960s or 1970s romantic Hindi movie set in the highlands, the most notable of these featuring the legendary actors Shammi Kapoor and Sharmila Tagore. This regime eliminates the political from the frame, preferring, instead, to celebrate and exoticize Kashmir as an outdoor setting for the disposition of fantasia. Its tropes, breathlessly na ve in retrospect, are those of unspoiled nature stretching beyond the reach of industrial pollution, laid out for the delectation of the touristic gaze. We find enshrined, in these picturesque and cinematic representations, the beauty of Kashmir s snow-clad mountains and crystalline springs, the magic of russet chinar leaves in autumn. This regime functions largely under the sign of Arcadian idyll. Its primary vehicle is, therefore, the idealized landscape.
On the other hand, we have had, since the early 1990s, the regime of the news photograph relayed from the frontlines of the Kashmir situation. This regime focuses on the cycle of low-intensity warfare, militant strikes, State repression and popular uprising that has crippled Kashmir, and the consequent militarization of its public space, as well as the vulnerability of its private, domestic spaces to intrusion and surveillance. The foci of this regime of visuality are teenaged stone-throwers, anxious soldiers, the widows of victims claimed by the conflict, the ruins of buildings destroyed in the crossfire. Harsh and unsparing, this visual reportage functions under the sign of dystopian crisis. Its primary vehicles are the portrait and the streetscape, images often taken on the run, during riot or curfew, under physically and psychologically taxing conditions.
Given the dominance of thes