salaam aleikum. after some 6 months i'm finally back in kashmir and pretty busy with visiting friends and organizing some stuff for the next weeks. feels definetly good to be here again, although the ride up to here by train and sumo was one of the worst trips i've ever made...got some bad food in delhi and spent almost the whole night vomiting in the toilet of the train. anyone who ever travelled with an indian train know's that there are far more comfortable places to spent your nights in...well, no reason to complain, i'm finally back and it feels just right to be here again.
although this time it's different than half a year ago during the uprising: the athmosphere in the city has somehow changed, you can almost see it in the faces of the people which seem to be just more friendly and relaxed than some months ago...but yet the mood is changing with everyday i'm here.
it's the foremath of the elections and the seperatist leaders called for a election-boycott and a 50 hour strike, beginning this evening.
so again, the strange athmosphere, this kind of invisible tension in the air is coming back and i find it pretty difficult to catch it visually.
there is nothing particular going on, it's just this feeling in the air than something might and propably will happen in the next days, although no one knows what and to what extend.
kashmir is a weird place with a sometimes challenging duality of life or however you may call it. on my first friday i was roaming around in one of the hot spot areas where usually after the friday prayers some protest is going on. so it's possible to walk in one street and watch the normal life going on as people go shopping and the kids are playing cricket and just some streets further down the road there will be stonepelting and the well-known smell of teagas in the air...
but at least for that day i refused to shoot the protest again, i'm trying to work out a different approach this time. i had a interesting conversation with balazs gardi about the possibility of showing the conflict without the usual indrigents which i used in my story last year as well, as there are barbed wire and lots of crying and shouting people...
i don't wanna sound cynical, but guess there's nothing easier to shoot than protest as the only difficulty is to get yourself into the situation (and respectively out of it again), but the images literally just jump into your camera.
so this time i'll at least try to get some different pictures out of the situations, let's see if it works. keep checking out the blog to see me fail ;)
well, despite my little uncertainity about my own abilities to achieve my goals everything is fine ove here. i just visited some friends of mine, one of them has just become a mother of a little kashmiri, a handful of a human being, just 18 (and by the time you read this already 19) days old. This time I've attached some private images as well to give you a little idea of how a typical kashmiri home in Srinagar looks like. It"s a bit like in south Germany, although the people are sitting on the ground and eat with their fingers...The last images is me at dal lake, one of the most beautiful places on earth and one of the reasons why i fell in love with kashmir ;)
So, enogh for this time, i gonna go out and shoot a bit of rainy kashmir with my now sealed d700, with which i'm slowly becoming some kind of familiar.
enjoy life and i'll try to update the blog with some images from the strike / elections / protest as soon as i can.
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