13th September 2014
IGNCA Auditorium
The making of a Visual History Archive: Selections from the Photography Collection of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC)
This lecture reflected on the imperatives and thrusts of the archival initiative undertaken at the CSSSC, and on the particular form of this visual archive that is based on documentation rather than acquisition. It brought forth the role of such an archived repository of textual and visual material from 19th and 20th century Bengal as an aid to the writing of new kinds of social, cultural and visual histories. More specifically, it considered the locations of photography and the photographic collections (sourced from individual photographers and families) within the wide variety of visual genres (ranging from paintings and prints to advertisements and commercial art) housed within their archive.
