I cannot see you today

Kashmir, 2014-ongoing

In Kashmir, visibility and speech are not neutral. Being seen as a political subject, or speaking plainly about the region’s conflictual past, can carry real costs – not only for individuals, but for the networks around them. This project treats that condition as both subject and method: it works where access retracts, where meetings become risky, and where history circulates in partial forms. The photographs are made within those limits, and are meant to describe them.

Over the last ten years, starting in 2014, I have returned to Kashmir many times, working across photographic projects, articles, and essays. My interest in local culture soon became inseparable from recent history, because the two are continuously entangled in daily life. Over time I met and stayed in contact with professors, journalists, activists, artisans, and religious figures. Their perspectives helped me understand how the relationship between Kashmir, India, and Pakistan is not only geopolitical, but social: it shapes work, education, religious life, and the terms of what can be said out loud.

Since 1949, Kashmir has been divided between India and Pakistan. The referendum meant to decide whether Kashmir should join India or Pakistan has never taken place. Most of the region is administered by India, and India and Pakistan have fought wars in 1965, 1971, and 1999. Many of the accounts I heard returned to the internal conflict that escalated after the massacre of pro‑independence demonstrators on the Gawkadal Bridge in January 1990. People spoke of friends who crossed into Pakistan to reach training camps; of killings and reprisals, including violence against pro‑India Muslims and Kashmiri Pandits; of sexual violence by paramilitaries; of torture; of men arrested and then disappeared.

They also mapped a more recent timeline: the attack on the Indian Parliament in 2001; the demonstrations in 2010, in which more than a hundred protesters were killed; and the protests of 2016, which I witnessed.

In August 2019, the Indian government revoked the special autonomous status granted to Jammu and Kashmir under Article 370 of the Constitution. Thousands of military personnel were deployed to prevent possible uprisings, and several prominent Kashmiri politicians – including the former Chief Minister – were taken into custody. Historic laws were repealed, including the one prohibiting the sale of land to non‑Kashmiris. Hundreds of people were arrested. Communication lines, including fixed and mobile internet networks, were cut off for many months.

My last visit to the valley had been in 2017. In December 2023, I decided to return for a straightforward reason: to meet my interlocutors again – some of whom had become friends – and understand what had changed in their personal, professional, and family lives. I set up appointments from Europe via WhatsApp. At first, people sounded happy to hear from me. As my departure approached, some began to cancel. Others stopped replying.

During a video call, S., a journalist, made the stakes explicit: “Here, people are arrested for liking an autonomist post on Facebook. You can’t trust anyone anymore. You’d better leave it alone.”

In Srinagar, I met no one. The work had to follow that fact. I photographed the city through the condition that produced it: a public life in which visibility can be interpreted, and speech is managed. I visited landmarks of Kashmiri resistance – buildings, streets, and squares whose political, cultural, and spiritual significance had been explained to me. I returned to places of earlier encounters, and I stopped outside the houses of people I could no longer meet, their boats moored on Lake Dal.

Click on the images below to see them in full screen.