Archival Photographs

This research theme focuses on the role of the photographer's personal archive not merely as a storage or institutional knowledge system but as a dynamic instrument integral to artistic production. It examines how material traces, decisions in image selection, and collaborative processes within the archive function intentionally to shape narratives and artworks. Understanding this mediating role foregrounds the archive’s function as an active partner in meaning-making and artistic creation, highlighting the materiality and social interactions embodied in archival practices.

This theme addresses the technical, curatorial, and theoretical challenges in preserving photographic archives for centuries, especially in the transition from physical to digital mediums. It highlights the limitations of digital storage, such as software obsolescence, data degradation, and loss of contextual metadata, and explores alternative preservation strategies that integrate both analog and digital methods. The research also emphasizes the importance of preserving not only images but their historical and textual contexts to maintain archival meaning for future generations.

This area investigates the impacts of digitizing extensive photojournalistic archives on scholarly research practices, contextual accessibility, and the experience of historical images. It emphasizes the triadic analytic framework encompassing photographs as material artefacts, metadata points, and large-scale unstructured image datasets. The theme encourages integration between traditional close reading and computational distant reading to overcome challenges posed by digital remediations, such as loss of physical context and metadata inconsistencies, fostering a multi-layered understanding of photographic history and meaning.

Research under this theme reevaluates the historiography of photography in India by moving beyond Eurocentric narratives to situate photographic practices within colonial and postcolonial contexts. It distinguishes between using photographs as primary historical evidence and analysing their techno-material and socio-political histories. The theme underscores the diversification of Indian photographic studies, including the democratization of the medium in the twentieth century and the medium’s role in conditioning modern South Asian experiences, highlighting new archival possibilities and methodological frameworks for scholars.

This research theme deals with the archiving of photographic materials considering their unique chemical and structural properties, historical significance, and evidentiary value. It explores the appraisal, arrangement, description, and preservation processes tailored for photographs as archival documents distinct from textual records. Recognizing photographs as indispensable visual testimonies with both information and historical value necessitates specialized knowledge and methodologies within archival science to ensure their longevity and accessibility for future research and cultural heritage.

This theme addresses the integration of qualitative photointerpretation and quantitative photogrammetric techniques to monitor and analyze temporal geomorphological changes. It examines the methodological challenges of processing historical aerial photography with incomplete technical metadata and reconstructing data into unified reference systems. Applied to landslide monitoring, it underscores the value of combining traditional geological analyses with advanced photogrammetric digital terrain models to assess slope dynamics over decades, thus contributing to the fields of geomorphology, hazard assessment, and environmental monitoring.