Unframed: Discovering Image Practices in South Asia

Unframed presents some of the complex dimensions of South Asia-oriented lens-based media, specifically tracing the evolution of photography in the subcontinent from the nineteenth century to the present. Through intersecting trajectories, thirty-one texts, arranged in five distinct yet interdependent sections, examine the general history/particular meta-histories of the medium in our region, reflecting the depth of image practices in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal and Myanmar.

Drawing upon the broader arc of South Asian visual cultures, this collection/reader analyzes emergent themes, testimonies and socio-cultural shifts through key discussions around the invention, application and consequent proliferation of lens-based work. Seminal analyses revised for this volume, as well as new commissioned essays and a set of interviews with practitioners/curators collectively explore the subtle entanglements of memory and space; notions of selfhood; the blurring of geographic taxonomies; the edicts of the gaze; the rupture of identity; varied dimensions of mirroring/othering; and the unstable politics of etching moments in time.

Unframed thereby turns a critical eye upon lyrical and evidentiary frameworks, challenging the obduracy of our narrative positions and the conditioned habits of viewing that reinforce our intractable claims to know ‘who’ and ‘where’ we are. These pages offer fresh insights into how our analogue, digital and other hybrid technologies compel us to confront any monolithic history of photography by working through the multiplicity of facts and the singularity of truth.