Sohrab Hura. Snow.

Five winters in Kashmir

Sohrab Hura is an Indian photographer. He joined Magnum Photos in 2014 and became a full member in 2020. Snow is a project he began in 2015.

From 2015 to 2019, every winter, Hura returned to the part of Kashmir administered by India. It is one of the most militarised regions in the world, a place of political tension lasting decades, where every story is contested.

Kashmiris divide winter into three stages. Chillai Kalan is the great cold, the harshest. Chillai Khurd is the small cold. Chillai Bache is the baby cold, when the snow begins to melt. Hura followed that sequence. His pictures do not stay fixed in one moment; they drift with the season.

Because he kept coming back, he did not look at Kashmir as a stranger arriving for the news. He looked at it as a place he had come to know, and the better he knew it, the harder it was to understand.

Not conflict, but surface

Snow does not follow the path of photojournalism. There are no clear central frames of guns, protests or ruins. Instead there are snow covered roads, faint human outlines, scenes emptied of people.

Many pictures look at first like postcards: mountains, lakes, white trees, soft light. Look longer and other signs surface at the edges of the frame. A fence. A checkpoint. A mark on the snow. The picturesque slowly gives way to what remains of violence.

Snow, as Hura sees it, is more than weather. It is a veil, a silence, a surface onto which fear and uncertainty are projected. It is beautiful, and because it is beautiful it can hide a great deal.

Hura folds memory, metaphor and mood into his visual language. Some images are sharp, some blurred, some nearly abstract. He does not try to make things clear, because the place itself is not clear.

When the snow melts

The thaw in Snow carries a double meaning. The white layer thins, and with it the illusion of calm. The land underneath keeps changing, like its contested status.

In August 2019, Hura went back to Kashmir one last time, for a friend's wedding. That same week, the Indian government revoked the special status granted to Kashmir under Article 370 of the Constitution. A private trip met a turning point in history. The project found an ending no one had planned.

In 2026, MACK published Snow as a book. What began as five winter journeys became an object you can hold, turning the pages from the great cold to the thaw.

Why Snow stays with you

Snow raises a question many photographers avoid: can a wounded place really be photographed? Hura does not answer with shocking images. He answers with hesitation.

The line between document and inner life dissolves in this work. The viewer is not handed a conclusion. They have to sit with ambiguity, and ask why they want everything to be so clear.

It is a lesson in the limits of the image. Some things lie beneath the snow where the camera cannot reach. Hura does not pretend to reach them. He shows us the snow, and lets us know that something is underneath.