KAMRAN YOUSUF IS THE FIRST PHOTOGRAPHER IN KASHMIR WHO HAS BEEN ARRESTED IN THE PAST FIVE YEARS. HE WAS RELEASED ON BAIL IN MARCH.
MERAJ-UD-DIN, veteran Kashmiri photographer and videographer, Srinagar I tell young photographers that there are other things in Kashmir to shoot. Conflict is not the only way to build your profile. Show Kashmir’s culture, its nature.
FAROOQ JAVED KHAN, president, Kashmir Press Photographers Association, Srinagar
cover their backs well and not cross the line when it comes to journalism,” says Faisul Yaseen. To any young photographer who will listen, this is senior photographer Farooq Khan’s advice: “I tell them there are other things in Kashmir to shoot. Conflict is not the only way to build your profile. Show Kashmir’s culture, its nature.” Khan is the president of the Kashmir Press Photographers Association. It is advice that has few takers simply because a day spent shooting papier mache handicrafts or the Tulip Garden or the Dal Lake cannot build an alternative reality.
Masrat Jan, a young woman freelance photographer, opens her laptop to show two pictures of a single day. On April 1, the day the news about Shopian’s encounters broke, she got out of bed thinking she would spend the day differently. “By 5 am, I was at Srinagar’s floating vegetable market clicking the boats. I watched the vegetables change hands – from the farmer to the buyer. And then I got to know what happened in Shopian, ”she recalls.
At 4.30 pm, she was in Shopian clicking people ducking the pellets and teargas shells fired from shotguns by paramilitary troopers and policemen at the procession of mourners. “When the CRPF shoots a Kashmiri you have to tell that and when a Kashmiri shoots a Kashmiri you have to show that too,” she adds. Lately, she has been thinking of joining a newspaper fulltime. “If something should happen to me, I want that somebody should at least own me. Not like what happened with Kamran. But Kamran should not quit the profession. Otherwise people will think he did something wrong.”
Is Kamran’s a cautionary tale for Kashmir’s photographers, I ask Vikar Syed, an independent photographer whose work has been featured in the BBC. He is one of Kamran’s friends from south Kashmir. “What do I do best? I take photos,” he answers. “I also want to shift from shooting funerals, women crying…then I tell myself I have to be strong. I have studied journalism and its ethics, I’m not someone who just one day decided to start shooting with my camera. In Kashmir, you can’t shut your eyes to the conflict. As for Kamran, he came out free, didn’t he?”
I need to be in the middle of both protesters and security forces while taking photos to hear what they’re saying. Can’t be on one side. No side is a safe side as such.
SANNA MATTOO, freelance photographer, Srinagar
There is another pressure on Kashmir’s cameramen these days. The pressure of daily demonstrating one’s neutrality in a profession that is under attack due to the impact of a photograph and the huge numbers of people in the field. The competition is fierce. There are now more than 10 local papers in the Valley and as many photo agencies. The conflict, ironically, has opened up avenues for jobs; the conflict has brought, in its wake, conflict-watching. Someone or the other at an agency between Ankara and New York and Tokyo is looking and buying pictures from Kashmir because they are feeling angry, upset or curious. Photographer Ahmer Khan, a downtown boy, who organised Srinagar’s first cybergames championship in 2013, has tried to see where he can fit. He freelances for Diplomat, a Japanese magazine; for Anadolu, a Turkish news agency, and Vice News, a current affairs channel in New York.
“Questions are constantly thrown at us about our work. For a newspaper photo, in case of a death, we try not to show the body so people say, ‘you never show the body because you don’t want to show…’. But somebody shooting with his mobile camera from the house next to where a death has happened, can click and show everything!” says Farooq Khan. Photographers battle cynicism daily to establish their street cred. Sanna Mattoo, a photographer we meet just outside Amar Singh College, says the ordinary Kashmiri is nowadays suspicious of anyone with a camera.
Nissar, a photographer from Pulwama who meets us in Srinagar, shows us the sides of his face that have blistered due to the effect of continuous exposure to teargas shells. “Three things frighten us now. The awaam (people), the police and the army. As we near the encounter site, which we rush to photograph, our fate is almost as unpredictable as that of the militants. A man without a weapon fears the man with one. But the funny thing is,” he says patting his camera, “I think they fear this too.”