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| Photo by Sohrab Hura |
As I’ve mentioned here before, I love photography writing. I relish reading perceptive critics’ attempts to extract meaning from what is an inherently enigmatic medium. Recently, newyorker.com, in its “Photo Booth” department, published four excellent photography reviews: Samanth Subramanian’s “Sohrab Hura’s Frozen Vision of Kashmir” (May 2, 2026); Max Norman’s “August Sander’s Enormous Attempt to Capture a Lost World” (May 21, 2026); Taran Dugal’s, “How Raghu Rai Captured an India in Transition” (May 23, 2026); and Hilton Als’, “The Expansive Joy of Mao Ishikawa” (May 30, 2026). I want to consider each of them and note some of their highlights.
Samanth Subramanian, in “Sohrab Hura’s Frozen Vision of Kashmir,” reviews a new book of Hura’s photos called Snow. Two things about the book strike him immediately: (1) “Each of the hundred and seventy-five photos sits by itself, square and silent, on a white page, without a jot of text to indicate when and where it was taken, or what it depicts”; and (2) “there’s barely any direct sign of the conflict that has, for decades, eaten into the very bones of Kashmir, a territory claimed so ferociously by India and Pakistan that they’ve fought several wars over it, pushing its people into anger, ruin, and, since the nineteen-eighties, armed uprisings against Indian rule.”
Subramanian’s piece functions like an introductory essay to Hura’s book. He tells us that Hura, who lives in Delhi, took these photos beginning in 2015, when he first travelled to Kashmir; that the photos pre-date the wrenching violence inflicted by the Indian state upon Kashmiri society, starting in 2019; and that Hura’s approach to taking these photos was improvisatory. On this last point, Subramanian says,
He’d go to Srinagar or Pahalgam, catch a bus out, disembark in the countryside, and meander back into town through fields and villages. Invariably, people would wonder about this lone outsider on foot and invite him into their homes for tea. Much of “Snow” unfolds in the domestic or pastoral register. Two bowls of rice on a blue carpet, gleaming as they catch the sun from the window. A teen-ager dragging home an orange cooking-gas cylinder with the aid of just a rope. Tomatoes floating in a large, clear puddle. A sheep being shorn, its shearer tossing onto a blue tarp drifts of wool that look no different from the snow on the surrounding ground.
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| Photo by Sohrab Hura |
Subramanian admires these photos not just for their beauty, but for their cold reality. He writes,
The snow is, of course, everywhere. In the Indian psyche, the idea of Kashmir as a winter wonderland has been unshakeable, polished often through Bollywood numbers that interrupt some urban plot to whisk their hero and heroine away to dance and sing on the Himalayan slopes. In some of Hura’s photos, the snow is still beautiful when it swaddles a landscape, Bruegel-like. But mostly the snow is a pervasive, persistent force: stacked so high outside a window that it cuts off the light, enveloping cars, coming down day and night. Even when the snow is absent, winter, its coldhearted parent, makes itself felt in the bare branches of trees and the sere grass in the fields. Kashmir is as much hardship as it is beauty, as much despair as it is resilience.
For me, the best part of Subramanian’s piece is its concluding paragraph:
What does “Snow” testify to? Possibly to a way of life that not only survives many kinds of precarity—cruel weather, scanty income, a despotic army—but that even molds itself to them. I kept returning to an image of the side of a house with unfinished red brick walls and a corrugated metal roof. Quilts and blankets burst out of its upper windows, perhaps to be aired or perhaps as plugs to keep out the winter wind. It’s a sight so unexpected that it feels faintly comic, until you clock just how many blankets there are—and how bitterly cold it must be in that house at night. The day is bright, and the distant peaks are carpeted in green, but there’s still a berm of snow on the road by the house, as if to warn that the winter will never entirely leave this land.
What does “Snow” testify to? – I relish that question. And I relish the way Subramanian finds an answer in one of Hura’s photos.
Max Norman’s “August Sander’s Enormous Attempt to Capture a Lost World” is a review of Yale University Art Gallery’s exhibition “August Sander’s People of the 20th Century.” This is a show of Sander’s famous series of portraits taken from about 1910 to around 1950 in which he sought, as Norman says, “to make nothing less than a visual catalogue of all the types and professions in Germany.” Norman describes it as Sander’s “largest exhibition yet” – “the images are hung in tall, orderly grids, like a periodic table of the human elements.” I’m familiar with Sander’s work: see my “On August Sander: Dyer v. Lane” (June 21, 2014).
What’s interesting about Norman’s piece is his observation that while Sander saw people in terms of categories – farmers, tradesmen, artists, professions, and so on – he also noticed difference, singularity, oddness. He says, “Despite his claims to universality, Sander thought with his eye, which was attracted to abnormal bodies, unforgettable faces, unkempt free thinkers, and all sorts of people the Nazis would soon label 'unerwünscht,' or undesirable.”
I love that “Sander thought with his eye.” It locates Sander’s art not in his classifications, but in his visual acuity.
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| Photo by August Sander |
A farmer and his wife, allegorized as “Propriety and Harmony,” look out at us from hooded eyes like a beat-down Adam and Eve. The man subtly smiles as he rests a hand on his seated wife’s shoulder, but she holds her mouth in a weary slant and clasps a bouquet of flowers, which, along with her black dress, turn this not so much into an aged nuptial portrait as a memento mori. With bracing clarity and a drop of respectful nostalgia, Sander shows us people as they were, rather than as they wanted to be.
Taran Dugal, “How Raghu Rai Captured an India in Transition” is a tribute to Rai, who passed away April 26, 2026, at the age of eighty-three. Dugal reviews Rai’s 2015 book Picturing Time, “a kaleidoscopic compendium of work that spans fifty years and chronicles modern India through its formative decades, as it grappled with newfound statehood and the volatile forces of breakneck modernization.” Dugal says,
Despite the documentary nature of his work, Rai’s practice, as he writes in “Picturing Time,” was rooted in the “divine concept of darshan,” or “a complete awareness” of “the reality of a place, a person, the physical and the inner aura, reflected in its entirety.” He believed that “some situations arise from somewhere to bless you with the unexpected,” and understood that a good photo unfolds like a dream: initially, the lightning-bolt shock of aesthetic confrontation, and later the remembrance—memory-images persisting long after the page is turned, the book put away, the subject of the picture itself long forgotten.
That’s a little too cosmic for me. But one of the photos used to illustrate Dugal’s piece is inspired. It’s called “Monsoon Downpour in Delhi” (1984). Dugal describes it superbly:
My favorite shot from the book is “Monsoon Downpour in Delhi,” from 1984, which shows a bull pulling a load in the heavy rain, its driver balancing barefoot atop a wooden cart. To his left is a black car with a bulky, rounded frame, glimmering in the deluge. One look at the image and I remembered the Delhi monsoons from my childhood summers—the intolerable humidity, the legions of darkened clouds gathering on the horizon, followed by stentorian thunder and relentless, life-affirming rain. The photo functioned as a window into the past, but it reminded me, too, of the future.
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| Photo by Raghu Rai |
The show consists of four series of photos: “Red Flower,” “Life in Philly,” “A Port Town Elegy,” and “My Family.” Of the “Red Flower” pictures, Als says,
All are gelatin-silver prints, a format that adds to the shock and the warmth of the flash lighting. In one shot, we see a couple in bed, looking delightedly at the camera, and then, in the next, the same couple facing each other as they kiss. The tenderness of their need is moving. The third image shows some Black men outside what I assume to be a bar. The distance is reportorial—Ishikawa pulls back to show us what this world looks like, at least in part—and what really gets to me are certain details in the picture. It’s a warm night; to the right of the frame, a woman in a long dress stands between two men. The man to her left wears a short-sleeved shirt; her companion on the other side sports a patterned shirt, light-colored pants, and a pair of white shoes. The flash is like another level of heat. But what one fixates on here is how the two men flanking the woman stand protectively close to her. They are not possessive; they simply recognize her smallness, her vulnerability, while Ishikawa recognizes theirs.
That “What really gets to me are certain details in the picture” made me smile in recognition. It's the response of a true photography writer. Recall Roland Barthes: “Certain details may 'prick' me” (Camera Lucida).
My favorite passage in Als’ review is his description of the “A Port Town Elegy” series. He writes,
The men in “A Port Town Elegy” are day laborers and dockworkers she met through a bar she owned in Naha. The energy in these pictures is different from that in “Red Flower”—more confrontational, infused with male bravado and despair. The subjects are defined by poverty and its limiting power: one gets the sense that they drink to forget themselves, while howling to declare themselves—to the cosmos, to one another, to Ishikawa’s camera. A man dancing alone, barefoot, is a wonderful portrait of unself-conscious desolation and freedom, all at once. The photographs in “A Port Town Elegy” are strong images about being trapped and exercising masculinity. But who takes the poor’s power or demand for power seriously? Ishikawa doesn’t sentimentalize these guys; she lets them get in her face (and, by extension, her frame), she pays attention to them, and imagine how rare that is in their world!
Ishikawa doesn’t sentimentalize her subjects; she pays attention to them. Her photos are serious acts of attention.
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| Photo by Mao Ishikawa |
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