Personal Paradigms

30 April 2020

Lucero Alomia. Baldia. Mexico, from the series Silence, 2018. Analogue collage

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, how do we visually or affectively trace or archive relationships?

This issue is supported by the MurthyNAYAK Foundation.

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EDITORIAL

Movement and the Making of Home: Family Photographs Through a Transnational Lens

Deepali Dewan, Thy Phu, and Jordache A. Ellapen

  Family photographs often convey a sense of place, a sense of home. They seem to fix people to a location and to each other. Indeed this stasis, one could argue, seems in direct contrast to the increased mobility of people around the world over in the twentieth century, as colonial and...

Family Still in Motion: Goa – Karachi – Toronto

Deepali Dewan

  The Michael and Colleen D’Souza family photo collection, now part of The Family Camera Network archive at the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, contains images tracing the family’s journey from Goa, when it was a Portuguese colony and is now part of India, to Karachi, when it was part...

Editor's Note: A Part of My Life...

Rahaab Allana

My thinking is not separate from objects… the elements of the object, the perceptions of the object, flow into my thinking and are fully permeated by it; my perception itself is a thinking, and my thinking a perception… There is an empiricism which so delicately involves itself with the...

The Family Photo: Inventing Time, Place, and Memory

Parvati Nair

Madras, 1965. The living room of my grandparents’ home had two walls adorned with photographs, one facing the other. On one, there was the family, our family, the various momentous events of sons and daughters, graduations, weddings, and births. The story of three generations told through...

Bangalore Flat

Joseph Lubitz and Chinar Shah

  Home Sweet Home is an exhibition series started by Chinar Shah in 2015, and mounted in people’s residences using available domestic space to reflect on the theme of the “home” as a lived location as well as conceptual idea. While the art market that depends on the capitalist...

The Transformation of “Bodyguard Lane”

Interview with Philippe Calia

BIND, The Bodyguard Lane Album. 2017.  This work started as a commission carried out by five photographers (BIND) about a group of families settled and living on a pavement in Central Mumbai (Bodyguard Lane); it culminated in a photo album especially crafted in conversation with the...

Kashmir: A Lost Childhood

Interview with Anita Khemka and Imran Kokiloo

Left: Family Holiday I. Aru and Pahalgham. 1985. QSS print; Right: Family Holiday II. Pahalgham. 1985. QSS print. Can you talk about the phases of this project and the challenges of doing so now through the perspective of your own family? Anita Khemka: This work started as a reaction...

Indian Memory Project: Materiality and Tactility

Zainab Mufti

 “He left behind several boxes of photographs and slides that he had taken as an immigrant in UK. My need of engaging with his memory was to look and re-look at the photographs and relive the stories about the images he would narrate often. Naturally then, for me a photograph, any photograph,...

The Residents of Malcha Mahal, Delhi

Interview with Leonie Broekstra | Introduction by Ellen Berry |

Left: Wilayat and Cyrus outside of Malcha Mahal. c.1990. Photo Negatives; Middle: Sakina in the first class waiting room at the New Delhi Railway Station. c.1980. Archival photograph; Right: Sakina. c.1965. Archival photograph. I should start out by saying that the family’s history...

FEATURES

Alaigal

Joel Fernando

Praxis

Rohith Krishnan

Seeing Double: The Photographic Lives of Debalina Majumdar and Manobina Roy

Mallika Leuzinger

The Armenians

Interview With Alakananda Nag

Our Songs from the Forest

Uma Bista

Curating GoaPhoto 2019

Interview with Co-curator Akshay Mahajan

Goa Familia: Encounters with Oral Histories

Lina Vincent

Ghar

Anu Kumar

Bageecha

Kannagi Khanna

Sundari

Priyadarshini Ravichandran

Mildred

Skye Arundhati Thomas

I'll Be Looking at the Moon But I'll Be Seeing You

Harikrishna Katragadda & Shweta Upadhyay

The Wartime Family Album

Text by Aditya Kapoor

An Interview with Col. Pradeep Kapoor and Aditya Kapoor

Col. Pradeep and Aditya Kapoor

The Failure of the Archive: Allan deSouza’s The Lost Pictures

Gayatri Gopinath

The Image World

Yashna Kaul

Caught Between Two Worlds

Sarah Ainslie

Ode to the Home (Screen): Notes from an obscure computer history

Anisha Baid

Parivaar @1Shanthiroad

Suresh Jayaram

Eat with Great Delight

Rajyashri Goody

Silence

Lucero Alomia

Pictures in My Hand of a Boy I Still Resemble

Srinivas Kuruganti

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