'Framing Portraits, Binding Albums': Family Albums as Academic Discourse

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 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, Framing Portraits, Binding Albums, editors Shilpi Goswami and Suryanandini Narain initiate a discourse towards this aspect of memory preservation. Family albums can not only be bearers of individual family histories, but also of conversations on larger socio-political contexts and of intergenerational dialogues.

A culture that was once limited only to the aristocrats, royals, and British documentary photographers capturing their colonial subjects, saw a democratisation with the turn of the century. The rise of local photo studios and the proliferation of basic 35 mm film cameras made the form accessible across India. With a sense of belonging, the aspiration of documenting their own lives through periods of upheaval and peace captured the subconscious of masses. Hence, it becomes imperative to clear the dust off these valuable family assets and deconstruct them as artifacts of social studies.

Divided into eight sections, the book examines how family and personal photographs intersect with larger social contexts. With personal accounts of artists, individuals, academics and photographers, the chapters tap into the possibility of deploying such photographs in the modern academic discourse of contemporary public history.

The chapters mostly invoke personal history and memory to reflect back on family histories. In the chapter ‘My Mother라이브 바카라 Stories: Access, Absence, and Archive in the Making of Family Albums’, historian Ajay Salunkhe writes about family photographs his mother procured and preserved throughout her life; of her, him and his brother growing up in a slum, of their separation from their father, of family functions and reunions.

Salunkhe tells a story not just of the self but of society as a whole. The black and white photographs showcase the history and culture of a family through the eyes of a woman.

While the photographs of young Salunkhe and his brother wearing suits and the mother라이브 바카라 portrait, decked up, clicked in a photo studio show aspiration and a yearn for a better future, the family-gathering photographs show the importance of relationships. Then there are transitions. A family photograph taken in an apartment allotted by the Slum Rehabilitation Authority (SRA) in 2002 shows content faces peering into the camera. Then, a looming sense of aloofness takes over when we see his father. Shortly after, the father separated from the family, and eventually disappeared from the family photographs as well.

This exclusion from photos—the frozen form of life and relations and a talisman of times and relationships—denotes unsaid goodbyes and abrupt endings. His mother라이브 바카라 act of cutting off the section of the photograph where his father once used to be depicts freedom of expression and defiance in a predominantly patriarchal setting.

From extended acts of remembrance and reveries, family photographs are also discussed as a material of hard evidence. In the chapter on migration, displacement and diaspora, the authors discuss the potential of these photographs as historical statements to realities of trauma and rebuilding. Through photographic evidence, the authors have documented the lives of the Anglo-Indian community, the trauma of the 1947 Partition and the concept of emancipation through cultural intermixing with Suriname as a case study.

In the chapter on visualising class and caste hierarchies, the authors write about the visibility and invisibility of servants and servitude in Indian family photographs and explore a Dalit family라이브 바카라 photo archive in mid-twentieth-century Uttar Pradesh. The other chapters in the book explore the themes of sexuality and family, negotiating ethnic margins, visualisation of materiality and familial response to state positions.

One might wonder how much of this archiving and memory building is a conscious effort by the participants of these photographs. In the chapter ‘Yatra Chitra/Parivaar Chitra’, Narain writes about how a recent international scholarship has regarded family photographs as the means of insights into feminine engagements in private and personal lives. In her chapter, she refers to the archives of Mrs Gupta (1933-2013) who, she believes, made a conscious effort to preserve her perspective of life as an activist and a householder. A touring album—also named ‘Yaatra Chitra’, compiled by Mrs Gupta and her son Guddu—along with a family album ‘Parivaar Chitra’ become the point of aesthetic and formal comparison. The deliberate difference and intervention initiated by the primary producer and archivist—Mrs Gupta— in these two albums makes us look at it as a conscious practice.

On the very first page of this travel album are five photographs of the family clicked in Madras and Mahabalipuram. On the top left, Guddu is standing at an intersection with the clock tower of the Chennai central station in the background. The next two images show the family in front of the Victoria Public Halls. In Mahabalipuram, we see the family standing next to the Butter Ball Rock and a famous elephant sculpture. The next page has a few images of the Shiva temple and the rathas (chariots) with the family in front of it.

The photographs, juxtaposing the family with important monuments and historical/geological areas in the continuous pages of the album, neatly marked with written notes and critical details like locations and dates, explain Mrs Gupta라이브 바카라 active involvement in presenting herself and her family in the context of topography. An avid reader and a diligent planner, she made a conscious effort to keep documented history of these travels as a fulfilled process. Her efforts to keep her auteur-like signature and retain her identity as a traveller, show a unique consistency of avoiding close-ups of her family members. The photographs, often taken by guides and attendants, were meticulously directed by Mrs Gupta.

Taking the conversation of such conscious efforts forward, the chapter ‘When I start photography, I start with my family’ records the conversation between Jaisingh Nageswaran and Rajyashri Goody. The two contemporary artists talk about how the form of family photographs has been incorporated in their own practice. With both belonging to the Dalit community, the conversation between the two visual artists touches upon various aspects and politics of photographing the family and how the marginalised section in India is expected to be represented.

Nageswaran라이브 바카라 photos in the book, taken from their series ‘I Feel like a fish’, consist of photographs of his family taken by him from 2020 onwards. Mostly taken with a cell phone, a device so accustomed with daily life rather than an intrusive DSLR camera, the images show intimate, close views of the family.

A close-up portrait of his father in bare body, an image of a woman cleaning the family home premises, a kid playing with a family member in a room with a portrait of BR Ambedkar hanging on the wall, someone in bed with her face down—these images create a melancholic scene of rest or solitude. The photographs generate curiosity among the viewers about their temporal existence of them, an enquiry into life itself.

These photographs and albums of domesticity provide an insight into interpersonal relationships and familial values and in the process present a microcosm of society at large—sometimes reflecting the banality of the everyday life of regular people and sometimes bringing forth critical information of the socio-economic strata to which they belong.

Family photographs, thus, are veiled marvels—unpeeling them offers a glimpse into an unknown world that is often not seen in the images. The book helps us question the academic disregard for family photographs and their significance in understanding personal and public narratives of society. While doing so, it provokes us to take out the dusty albums stored in stood the wooden cabinet—waist high and slightly worn down, with a loose panel on the side.

Animikh is a photographer and a visual artist who currently works with 바카라