Untitled, 2014. From the series Not at Home.
Courtesy the artist and SepiaEye © Charan Singh, All Rights Reserved DACS, 2025.
Courtesy the artist and SepiaEye © Charan Singh, All Rights Reserved DACS, 2025.
What Would My Father Think is a first-person narrative written in a diary form invoking a sense of privacy that the subaltern subject does not have. It offers a deeply personal and politically resonant reflection on the intersections of identity, memory, and familial legacy. Drawing from his own experiences as a queer artist and son, Singh navigates the complexities of self-representation in the shadow of patriarchal expectations and cultural silence. Through the lens of family photographs—those intimate yet often curated objects—Singh unpacks how images both preserve and conceal truth. The chapter is a poignant meditation on love, loss, and the longing for acceptance, tracing how the act of looking back can become a radical assertion of self.
Framing Portraits, Binding Albums: Family Photographs in India
Shilpi Goswami, Suryanandini Narain, (eds.)
Zubaan Books, 2025
Long neglected in academic discourse in India, family photographs make a silent contribution to the histories of photography, marginality and the family. In this volume, the writers dwell on the importance of family photographs and their visual omnipresence in our daily lives.
They point out how family photographs have belonged to the ‘vernacular’ material of visual culture, more seen and lived with, less written and consciously thought about. Attempting to retrieve family photographs from a space of neglect, this volume demonstrates how they are fundamental to the microhistories of a nation and its many societies, and suggests the importance of such counterarguments to the dominant strains in an emerging discursive space.
The essays do not offer a comprehensive survey of all types of family photographs in India. Instead, they present focused insights into chosen areas of interest on the part of the writers. Collectively, they embrace the intersectionalities of gender, caste, class and regional trajectories, making the politics of representation even more layered with contestations between the historical, oral and affective memorialisation surrounding family archives and photographs. These concerns centrally inform the essays, as they accept and negotiate a terrain shared by all types of narrativisation.
Shilpi Goswami, Suryanandini Narain, (eds.)
Zubaan Books, 2025
Long neglected in academic discourse in India, family photographs make a silent contribution to the histories of photography, marginality and the family. In this volume, the writers dwell on the importance of family photographs and their visual omnipresence in our daily lives.
They point out how family photographs have belonged to the ‘vernacular’ material of visual culture, more seen and lived with, less written and consciously thought about. Attempting to retrieve family photographs from a space of neglect, this volume demonstrates how they are fundamental to the microhistories of a nation and its many societies, and suggests the importance of such counterarguments to the dominant strains in an emerging discursive space.
The essays do not offer a comprehensive survey of all types of family photographs in India. Instead, they present focused insights into chosen areas of interest on the part of the writers. Collectively, they embrace the intersectionalities of gender, caste, class and regional trajectories, making the politics of representation even more layered with contestations between the historical, oral and affective memorialisation surrounding family archives and photographs. These concerns centrally inform the essays, as they accept and negotiate a terrain shared by all types of narrativisation.