Personal Paradigms
30 April 2020
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
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
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...
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
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
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”
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
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
“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
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...