Where do we come from and what do we consider familial? How do we perform or embody certain formations of identity, and question notions of displacement, alienation and self-imaging?

In the traditional sense, families are permanent or fixed units, and yet, through growing associations, we find that they are also evolving – riddled with secrets, new discoveries and myriad forms of coded expression around kinship. At a time when our affiliations to place, a language, a culture and hence history seem to be fraught with challenges, we may ask how to invent, intersect and construct an alternative self or community?

The issue aims to open out dimensions of our personal/public lives – our selfhood, homes and shifting paradigms – in order to re-think social norms and traditions around our roles, within and outside family. As communities grow, groups mingle, some dissipate, and others perish, but how do we reflect upon our lives and our futures? How do we visually or affectively trace or archive relationships? The idea of a ‘growing’ family or group therefore enables us to address larger questions of memory and trans-nationality.

The reach of this issue is to all lens based practices: archival trajectories and contemporary perspectives; candid photography, the family album and digital explorations, notions of the ‘everyday’, found material and all that contributes to the making of a collective memory.

We are also open to written submissions for this issue, either by way of a focused study on community/family/home, a fiction piece based on a series of images and even works of poetry.