Sohrab Hura’s Frozen Vision of Kashmir

If Hura had assembled “Snow” in 2019, he would have chosen only photos like these: lateral and coded, often with no humans in them. His taste for the direct had waned since his early years in photography, he said, and I saw what he meant when, later, he texted me a link to a project from 2005: a powerful study of rural laborers that was almost overbearingly frank in its black-and-white depiction of bodies toiling in the midsummer heat and faces sharply etched by the camera. Even as Hura’s reputation grew—in 2020, he became the first full member of Magnum from India—he found himself departing from the idea that “a factual, clean photo” could convey some sort of absolute truth. Broken images felt more real. “But ever since the Palestinian genocide I’ve been seeing so many photos of parents looking for kids, children looking for siblings, people collecting body parts—that affected my edit,” Hura said. “I have more photos of people in here than I would have had otherwise.” They’re sometimes playful, as in the image of three friends outfitting a snowman, or simply framed, as in that of a girl standing on a snowclad street, holding a Quran to her chest. “I did it to draw out the humanity of this place,” Hura told me.

In 2021, Hura suffered a dreadful case of COVID, which nearly halved his lung function and prevented him from venturing out to shoot; he panted even as he moved about his apartment. He grew tired of the screen and yearned to make something with his hands, so he started drawing and then painting. He has returned to photography only twice: first to shoot the literary scholar Ganesh Devy, when I profiled him for this magazine, and again to shoot Arundhati Roy ahead of the release of her memoir last year. Even when he was laid low by COVID, he felt a looming awareness of A.I., and it compounded his sense that photography had hit an epistemological wall. In previous eras, the wisest photographers knew that their work captured just a simulacrum of a physical moment, and they urged their audiences to look at the image but also beyond it. “The burden of the photo representing a fact, or evidence, was heavy, and we were trying to escape it,” Hura told me. Today, the rise of deepfakes and the velocity with which these fabricated photos assault us could corrode the credibility of even genuine images. “It’s a bit of a crisis for people,” Hura said. In a reversal, photographers now want us to buy into the reality that their images present. They no longer wish to escape the burden of testimony.

What does “Snow” testify to? Possibly to a way of life that not only survives many kinds of precarity—cruel weather, scanty income, a despotic army—but that even molds itself to them. I kept returning to an image of the side of a house with unfinished red brick walls and a corrugated metal roof. Quilts and blankets burst out of its upper windows, perhaps to be aired or perhaps as plugs to keep out the winter wind. It’s a sight so unexpected that it feels faintly comic, until you clock just how many blankets there are—and how bitterly cold it must be in that house at night. The day is bright, and the distant peaks are carpeted in green, but there’s still a berm of snow on the road by the house, as if to warn that the winter will never entirely leave this land.