Sepia-tinted Memory

Framing Portraits, Binding Albums highlights the startling absence of family photographs in academic discourse in India and underlines the importance of deconstructing them as artifacts of social studies

- Animikh

In a single-room accommodation, amid bare minimum necessities for a family of three, stood a wooden cabinet. Waist high and slightly worn down, with a loose panel on the side, the cabinet used to be my go-to spot during the hot and leisurely afternoons of summer vacations. Being in a family of working parents, my afternoons would often be spent on self-assigned projects of rummaging through the bookshelves, or reading. Sometimes, the thick family albums kept amid the books peeped from the shelves.

The albums were myriad; their presentation of photos changing with their physical form. Some were elaborate, with photos of my mother from her college days, her friends, of her playing the sitar in a gathering of distant family members. There were photos of my father, on his way to getting married—his face, young, marked by the hardships of labour from his teenage years as a refugee, yet his bright eyes set him apart from the other young men in the photographs. I was there too, in that small room cramped with cheap furniture, covered with towels, with a paper sword in my hand.

These photos are a testament to the quiet resilience of a family and their idea of belonging. Marked in each photo stuck in these albums is an anthology of life lived, people coming and going, a reflection of both—what was and what was endured.

Family photographs, an asset often tucked away neatly in a corner of such cabinets in households across our country, (and Southeast Asia) have not been a part of mainstream academic discourse. A form of legitimate anthropological study material, these albums give a sense of preservation of both private and public memory.

In the book,