The cliché becomes a metaphor: a picture is worth one thousand words. So what about the legendary picture of the Afghan girl with blazing blue eyes on the cover of ‘National Geographic’? Or the haunting picture of young children, and a naked girl child, running away from a ‘Napalmed’ village in Vietnam – by genocidal US air-force attacks during the Vietnam war? Or, that Pulitzer prize-winning photograph of a hungry, emaciated, dying child, slowly crawling to death, being preyed upon by a predatory vulture? Or, even closer home, a dead child in the rubble in Bhopal, her body half-hidden, real or stage-managed?

Irfan Nabi’s photographs transcend the medium, the message, the thousand words, and the fixity of the cinematic photographic frame. In the last village of Muslims in a Buddhist populated zone in Ladakh, he makes eye-contact. The picture is precisely called ‘Eye-Contact’. If you can read the eyes of this beautiful little girl, refusing to challenge the camera, or refusing to become both subject and object of fame, then you are already reading her eyes. They tell stories of one thousand or more years of solitude, as much as the magic realism of the incredible possibilities in her mind, in her real and imagined homeland: Tartuk.

So the camera takes a moment to click what is a final picture of an eternity. Does it?

No, often it is hard, processed through the tough territories of time and space through hard, protracted journeys in inaccessible, difficult terrain, in abject solitude, waiting for that precise moment, with patience and precision, when the moment is frozen into history. The ‘Eye-Contact’ is one such moment of revelation. And frame.

Indeed, what do you say of camel riders, in dark outlines, like an old Hollywood movie shot in the middle-east desert, with the mountains as high and craggy, many times more higher than a Texan landscape? Mixing incredible, moving geographies, with rare animals in a rare topography?

Or, horse polo shot from the distance, high up in the mountains where oxygen is less and life is not as easy as in the plains? Or a little girl in black and white, running in a village, which is a conflict zone in Kashmir? Is she running with joy? Yes, it seems. Or, even, lines drawn on a picture, like an impressionist painting, where the Pangong Lake, meditates among the multiple crossings of unimaginable beauty, like a Paul Klee painting?

If the camera is a mechanical object, the mind and eye behind the camera breaks the machine’s mechanical monotony and turns it into an object of art, of unprecedented beauty and meaning, because this beauty lies in the eye and mind of the photographer, not the camera. Hence, despite the painting becoming the true subjective depiction of realism, or great cinema being fiction which is also documentary, the photograph shot with compassion and sensitivity, and, of course, originality and genius, at once becomes a work of art. A synthesis of painting and cinema, not ‘still pictures’, but motion cinema, and a painting moving out of its frame, like a Van Gogh masterpiece.

Irfan Nabi’s pictures, of ordinary tourist frames, are elevated into classics, like that of Gulmarg, Pahalgam and Dal Lake in Kashmir. They tell hidden stories, inaccessible by words, as do his pictures of Buddhist monasteries, so high up that even the eye of the camera refuses to meet the turbulent, scolding sky, in terribly beautiful landscapes, so terrible that the loneliness of the pictures trap you. They are not clichés. They are telling a story of a haunted land where pellets and tear gas have transformed the landscape, as in Kashmir. They are memories, which he has recorded, as aesthetic reminders to human civilization, carrying a simple message.

Look at nature, And look at people who live in this nature in absolute, stunning synthesis. Their life is hard, but their eyes are beautiful. Like that little girl who makes eye-contact with civilization. Learn from it.

Pictures by Irfan Nabi. Curated by Nilosree Biswas

Irfan is a photographer, author, who believes images are all about stories. “Alluring Kashmir The Inner Spirit”, his photo travel book lensed unconventionally is a mint fresh take on the land, the people and it`s culture. “Seeds of Pomegranate”a book of tiny tales titled harps on photo romance as a genre and strings up a collection of 39 tales of love, longing and more, each accompanied by a black and white that is the quintessential metaphor of memories. His photographs have been featured for 27 times as Editor`s Favourite and published half a dozen times in National Geographic`s global photo community platform. They had also been a part of month long exhibition at International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) held at Leiden, The Netherlands titled “Picturing Asia”. His work is also a part of ‘Food: Our Global Kitchen’ a permanent exhibition at National Geographic Museum in Washington DC, 2014. Guardian Travel, Condé Nast Traveler, National Geographic Travellerhave chosen his images to be featured on their on social media handles. Irfan currently is wrapping his upcoming book on Ladakh and also completed first batch of filming for his next untitled book on Banaras.