Shilpi Goswami

Shilpi Goswami is an independent curator and a museologist based in Delhi, currently working with Art Insights for the Gwalior Palace Museum. She has worked with reputed national and international arts organisations in various capacities. Notable among them are the Gujral Foundation, Nation University of Singapore, Qatar Museum, What about Art, Left Word Books, Alkazi Foundation and Kiran Nadar Museum. She has two post-graduate specialisations in Publishing and Museology, and has co-authored Mastering the Lens: Before and After Cartier Bresson in Pondicherry. She has written in Allegory and Illusion: Early Portrait Photography from South Asia, Unveiling India: The Early Lensmen, 1850-1910. Her collaborator, Suryanandini Narain, is an Assistant Professor of Visual Studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her doctoral thesis addressed the feminine figure in family photographs from Delhi. A recipient of scholarships from the Ford Foundation, INLAKS and ICSSR, she has also been an assistant editor for various Marg volumes. She has published widely on photography, specifically on the feminine figure in Indian photographs, in journals and magazines such as Marg, Visual Anthropology Review, Economic and Political Weekly, Art India and others.

The grant will enable Shilpi and Suryanandini to organise a conference on family photographs from across India. This conference will investigate how family photographs contribute to the microhistories of people and their communities and provide counternarratives to dominant strains of thought and memory making. Themes of migration, displacement, trauma and death are intimately linked to the family photo. So are rituals, rites of passage and cultural identity that get shaped through the photograph as a document. Through the conference, Shilpi and Suryanandini hope to establish these microhistories, redeeming the family photographs from neglect and positioning them as significant sources for social and cultural research and documentation.

According to Shilpi and Suryanandini, a photograph as a visual, material or virtual artefact fulfils the desire for a family’s sense of completeness and memory-making, even while revealing the scaffolding of kinship beneath the flesh of affective relationships. The conference attempts to document and analyse these photographs to draw larger inferences about relational realities in family life in India. It will investigate if there are any prototypes to the notion of ‘ideal’ family that photographs try to approximate or, at times, subvert. The conference aims to recover queer identities, feminist voices, diasporic tension and challenged childhoods from the family photographs. It proposes to give space to memory and history and the liminal space between the two, as family photos operate in a domain that scrambles linear notions of time or fixities of space. It will include different periods of Indian history, local narratives and perspectives of gender, caste and class trajectories.

Through this conference, Shilpi and Suryanandini seek to develop a methodological and theoretical discourse around family photographs in India beyond the efforts that have been already made in this direction. Twenty-four contributors will present their work at the conference. All of them have worked on family photographs from varied disciplinary perspectives. Shilpi and Suryanandini have consciously selected early-career academics, research scholars, practitioners and leaders of fresh archival initiatives in the field of family photographs for the conference. They have steered clear of well-known authors and scholars to allow new voices both space and platform.

Initially, Shilpi and Suryanandini had planned a closed-door conference and workshop to deliberate on the subject and its possibilities. However, due to the COVID-19 outbreak, they altered the plan and instead will conduct a series of online workshops as a capacity-building effort for the contributors. Noted writer Urvashi Butalia will conduct the first workshop on the writing process. The second workshop will be conducted by Dr Surojit Sarkar, Associate Professor, Centre for Community Knowledge, Ambedkar University. He will address the research methodology of oral narratives, material cultures and visual culture to unearth hidden histories of communities. After this, Shilpi and Suryanandini will hold a two-day closed-door online conference on April 24 and 25, 2021, with all the contributors. Subsequently, Shilpi and Surya will consolidate the conference proceedings into an anthology on family photographs in India.

The outcome of this project will be the conference. The Grantee’s deliverables to IFA with the final reports will be an edited volume of the papers presented at the conference and the audiovisual documentation of the conference proceedings. Grant funds will pay for preparations and presentations by 24 participants at the conference and an accountant’s fees.