Sohrab Hura’s Snow is organised around a winter that arrives in three named stages. The photographs were made over five years of repeated visits to Indian-administered Kashmir, following the region through Chillai Kalan, Chillai Khurd and Chillai Bache — the harsh cold, the small cold, the baby cold. The seasonal frame gives the sequence its pace, but Hura’s real subject is attrition: snowmelt as a figure for the wearing down of illusions and for the shifting ground of a contested state.

Kashmir has been disputed since the partition of India and the end of British rule in 1947, with India, Pakistan and China all laying claim to territory whose inhabitants have long pressed for self-determination. Hura photographs landscapes and communities in which picturesque imagery repeatedly gives way to traces of conflict and violence. The region is promoted to Indian tourists as a paradise, above all as a place to experience snow, yet it remains one of the most heavily militarised places in the world. That contradiction — beauty set against brutality — drives the project.

Snow is the first of two paired publications. A forthcoming volume will turn to Barwani, in Madhya Pradesh, examining both places through the extremity of their seasons and the social, economic and political landscapes they disclose. The pairing matters: it prevents the Kashmir work from being read as an isolated case.

Published by MACK in 2026 as a 256-page hardcover, the book gives the sequence room to accumulate. For collectors drawn to documentary practice that refuses the neutral view, the value here lies in Hura’s long engagement, his structural discipline, and the way the twin-project frame places Kashmir within a larger comparative inquiry. It is a serious book, built to be read slowly across its seasons.