Looking at Kashmir through a lens

Titled Witness, the coffee-table book featuring 200 photographs is a comprehensive visual document telling the Kashmir story between 1986 and 2016. “This book is neither a photo essay nor a set of pictures from nine different photographers. To me, it is a single story witnessed by different people with different backgrounds at different points in time,” says Shaukat Nanda, one of the contributors to the book. 

The book which was recently released has been edited by Kashmiri documentary filmmaker Sanjay Kak. “1986-2016 is an important period for the entire region, and not just Kashmir. My request is that readers must not see this as a book giving them a quick history lesson. It is not meant to be a timeline of history. Rather it is a timeline of emotions which have been interpreted by photographers over these years,” adds Sanjay. 

Subsuming a whole bandwidth of age, inclinations, desires, experience and motivations, the contrib uting photographers range from rookies like 19-year-old Azan Shah to doyens of Kashmir photography like Meraj-ud-din. One of the major challenges behind the making of the book was to restore the old negatives and hard-disks that got washed away in the devastating flood of 2014. “The negatives were rotten. I put those photographs through the scanner, and then slowly everyday pictures started coming on the screen,” adds Kaushik Ramaswamy, who restored the negatives. 

The only non-Kashmiri photographer in the project Sumit Dayal says the importance of the book lies not just in the photographs but also in the stories behind the snapshots. “This is one book we all should read, and read very carefully. What you will see in this book with the photos are conversations that happened for over a year and a half that we spent together during its making,” he finishes.