Kashmiris, living in flux and under an Indian military siege, photographers like Ahmer are their poets, their reporters, and their intellectuals. All at once, their photos speak because activists and politicians and freedom fighters cannot. There is no freedom of speech or tolerance of dissent in a Kashmir suffocated by India, where the slightest acts of individuality are branded subversive, and in a world where the War on Terror seeps into every crevice.

XREF: Relates to broader discussions of art-as-resistance and how oppressive regimes transform creative work into political speech.

Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamopho…, loc. 493