Daily Archives: June 12, 2017

HT Photojournalist Burhaan Kinu’s Visual Narration On ‘What Children Wear’

Some of my photographic projects have been the documentation of a leprosy camp near Srinagar, a school for special children in Noida and the traditional art of mud-wrestling, to name a few. My work was also chosen as one of the 52 best photographs worldwide by Huffington Post in December 2013. I was interviewed by a researcher at Brown University, USA, for my work on conflict zones and photojournalism in Kashmir, with a special focus on my coverage of the teenager Showkat Ahmad’s death and the ensuing controversy. In October 2014, my work was exhibited and featured in University of Wisconsin’s (Madison), South Asia conference, Kashmir Studies panel, where eminent scholars and writers on Kashmir discussed my representation of Kashmir’s people and politics done through a series of photo essays.

Having grown up in Kashmir, photo-journalist Burhaan Kinu, started his career at the Kashmir Observer, where he documented the state’s conflict. He currently works with Hindustan Times and was recently awarded the Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Award for 2015 in the Photojournalism category.

Burhaan’s main goal and focus is to effectively represent the world around him, to provide a space to marginalized voices and construct alternative visions. This self-taught photojournalist recently visited the slums of Delhi – In a city bursting with stores that sell clothes and footwear from all kinds of internationally renowned brands, I visited a few slums to see what the children there wear. What Burhaan doesn’t say through words, strikes us in his photos, pushing us to think, re-think and re-visit our cupboards bursting with clothes, while many children make do with stained, worn out and even torn ones on a daily basis.