Bharat Sikka made the photographs in *Where the flowers still grow* during repeated visits to Kashmir in 2014 and 2015, and the book — 120 pages, published by Loose Joints in 2017 — is recognisably the work of someone trying to see a place rather than to summarise it. Kashmir occupies a mythic position in the Indian imagination: one of the world’s great mountain valleys, and since the late 1980s a landscape synonymous with political and sectarian conflict. Sikka, who is from New Delhi and studied at Parsons, approaches that contradiction personally rather than journalistically.
The spine of the project is a group of portraits: young Kashmiri men, each photographed alone against a landscape of enormous scale. They meet the camera directly. Around these portraits Sikka arranges a second register of pictures — objects found in homes, animals, abandoned buildings, passages of vegetation — that function as a kind of mise-en-scène, thickening the account of daily life and holding the indifference of the natural world against the fragility of individual lives. Mirza Waheed’s novel *The Collaborator*, about a young Kashmiri man caught between history and the present, served Sikka as a point of departure.
Sequencing matters here. The book moves between grandeur and intimate detail without forcing resolution, and what accumulates is less a document of the conflict than an emotional record of return visits: traces of events, and the mute things that outlast them. Sikka’s wider exhibition history — including presentations of this work at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2016 and at Nature Morte in 2017, alongside showings at the National Museum in New Delhi, Fotomuseum Winterthur, the Whitechapel Gallery, ICP and the Arles Photo Festival — situates the book within a sustained engagement with contemporary India.
For collectors, the object is worth attention on its own terms. Loose Joints issued it as a trimmed hardcover with frayed linen edges and a tip-on image, at 220 × 260 mm, with 45 colour and 16 duotone plates. The production is deliberately rough at the edges, in keeping with photographs that refuse to smooth over what they describe.
