Framing Portraits, Binding Albums: Family Photographs in India

Long neglected in academic discourse in India, family photographs make a silent contribution to the histories of photography, marginality and the family. In this volume, the writers dwell on the importance of family photographs and their visual omnipresence in our daily lives.

They point out how family photographs have belonged to the ‘vernacular’ material of visual culture, more seen and lived with, less written and consciously thought about. Attempting to retrieve family photographs from a space of neglect, this volume demonstrates how they are fundamental to the microhistories of a nation and its many societies, and suggests the importance of such counterarguments to the dominant strains in an emerging discursive space.

The essays do not offer a comprehensive survey of all types of family photographs in India. Instead, they present focused insights into chosen areas of interest on the part of the writers. Collectively, they embrace the intersectionalities of gender, caste, class and regional trajectories, making the politics of representation even more layered with contestations between the historical, oral and affective memorialisation surrounding family archives and photographs. These concerns centrally inform the essays, as they accept and negotiate a terrain shared by all types of narrativisation.

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SHILPI GOSWAMI is an independent editor, researcher and curator with a PhD in Cultural Studies. She has been an archivist for the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts, a curator at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, programme manager for What About Art? for Qatar Museums, Artistic Director of Gallery Nature Morte. Shilpi has co-authored Mastering the Lens: Before and After Henri Cartier-Bresson in Pondicherry (2013), and has contributed to Allegory and Illusion: Early Portrait Photography from South Asia (2013), Unveiling India: The Early Lensmen, 1850-1910.

SURYANANDINI NARAIN is Assistant Professor in Visual Studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She teaches courses on Indian visual culture, photography, aesthetic theory and critical writing. She has written extensively on photography and visual culture in India, especially around themes of women, the family, the home, everyday aesthetics and studio photography.