In the autumn of 1991, my girlfriend and I visited India for the first time.  Emerging from the aircraft door at Delhi International Airport, we stepped into a wall of intense and humid heat, a fog of pungent and unfamiliar smells and a cacophony of traffic noise.  It was an amazing moment and became an enduring, first impression of India. I made many photographs in Old Delhi, Agra and Jaipur and such was the intensity of, and potential for, image making, I returned on another occasion to continue.

However, on this trip, after a week of being immersed in this heady mix, we excitedly prepared for the cooler and quieter mountainous environment of Himachal Pradesh, north of Chandigarh.  Our itinerary had been changed away from Kashmir, due to an increase in violence as the conflict between indigenous Muslims and the Indian Army escalated.  Six weeks before departing the UK, a gun battle had occurred on Lake Dal near Srinagar, the capital of Kashmir, in which some Israeli tourists had been killed.

To our surprise and shock, we were flown to Kashmir anyway.  At Kashmir airport, the Indian military were everywhere.  We crossed Srinagar city during a daylight curfew in hired taxis, with a machine gun post on every street corner tracking us as we swept past.  After dinner on a houseboat on Lake Dal, the sounds of an intense machine gun battle stuttered out of the darkness.  The next morning, before we could even begin our trek, the Jammu & Kashmir Liberation Front dynamited the bridge we needed to cross to drive up the Lidder Valley.  Against what felt like common sense, we nonetheless continued on foot under the watchful eyes of the JKLF.

Over the following two weeks, we undertook an amazing journey, the impressions of which have remained with us long afterwards.  It truly was an unforgettable experience.  Here is a limited selection of the photographs I made during that journey.