Sohrab Hura’s latest photobook captures conflict beyond the frame
It begins in the harsh cold of winter: Kashmir, buried under thick snow; a man pulling two others on a sled; then a whiteout day during which the land is indistinguishable from the sky, the air dense with the wind-scattered ice crystals of snowflakes; a tiny silhouette of a lone figure just visible in the middle-ground; and in the distance, other figures – apparitions.
These are the opening images of Snow, which Indian artist Sohrab Hura photographed over five winters, until 2019, when the Indian government revoked Kashmir’s semiautonomous status bringing it under direct rule. That political rupture sits just beyond the frame. In a 2019 interview Hura noted, ‘I knew early on that my position was not to comment on the land’ as much as it was to comment on the fact that ‘I’m expected to claim Kashmir as my own’. Yet his images, which sit in the documentary style, suggest embedded, empathetic attention, attuned to how conflict settles into the rhythms of daily life.
Through the winters, people are pictured repairing sheds, commuting precariously atop buses, gathering hay. A woman pulls a woollen hat over a child’s ears; children play-fight with snowballs. There is joy in the candid photos of families, and guarded looks in the eyes of those who pose for portraits in the street. Hura is equally attentive to absences: plates of rice left uneaten; red plastic chairs abandoned in the snow; a half-written letter left by a window; accumulating interruptions, indicating lives paused or displaced, without explanation. As with his previous photobook The Coast (2019), Hura masters the art of sequencing as narrative. An image of a pile of terracotta bricks sits alongside one depicting a spill of crushed tomatoes; both echo recurring images of blood – on hands, in water, seeping into earth. The colour red moves through the whites of the book like a warning, surfacing and receding.
By the end, the suggestion of conflict sharpens: a line of women stand hand in hand, facing something, someone, outside the frame; a dark, viscous trail of liquid pools across the ground, its dark red tinge barely distinguishable from mud. Nothing is named, but the implication is difficult to ignore. Snow resists the clarity of reportage, offering something more disquieting: a landscape in which violence is ambient, absorbed into weather, into routine, into the act of looking.
Snow by Sohrab Hura. Mack, £65 (hardcover)
From the April & May 2026 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
