On Photographic Archives at the Chennai Photo Biennale

Drawing from a range of archival sources, artists and curators participating in the recently concluded Chennai Photo Biennale (CPB) engage with different imaginations of photographic archives. Emami Art presented Lalit Mohan Sen: An Enduring Legacy to highlight the philosophical and syncretic nature of the painter and printmaker’s photographic archive. Parvathi Nayar moves towards the speculative possibilities of history and storytelling through her project Limits of Change as it explores the Custodian Force of India (CFI)’s role in Korea in the 1950s, where they served as a peacekeeping force at the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ). Nirmal Rajagopalan curates a series of images from popular Tamil films from the archive of still photographer T. Lakshmikantan as part of Maasaru Kaatchiyavaruku (Those With Pure Vision) to reflect on the photographer’s legacy. Melissa Nolas speaks about addressing the gap in archiving children’s photography practices that led to the formation of the Children’s Photography Archive, foregrounding The Child’s Gaze. Lisa Kerezi talks about the process behind Ottie’s Picture Book and how photography gave her daughter Ottie a sense of control over their lives during the pandemic.

Mallika Visvanathan (MV): How does LM Sen's photographic work speak to his work as a painter and printmaker? Since his photography is associated with Modernism, can you tell us what his photographic archive reveals about the time and space he inhabited and how we can read and engage with this in the present?

Emami Art: In 2023, we showed a small section of his vast photographic collection in Lalit Mohan Sen: An Enduring Legacy, a retrospective-scale exhibition at our gallery, Emami Art. However, the exhibition at the Chennai Photo Biennale in 2025 is the first major exhibition focusing entirely on LM Sen's photographic practices. It includes diverse genres of his works, including photographs of posed models, landscape and ethnographic portraiture produced in the last two decades of his life. 

Although he started seriously practising photography during his student days in London in the 1920s, where he experimented with the medium and showed his works at exhibitions, his photographic practice was never isolated. Instead, as he explored the ethos of naturalism, it was deeply connected to his other artistic practices of oil painting and graphic art, for which he is better known. He often used photographs to reference his paintings or prints, and photography impacted his framing of pictorial composition and the use of light and shade. Whenever he travelled, he carried a camera and sketchbook with him. He used the drawings and pictures to give his prints and paintings a sense of locational specificity and authenticity. However, he never imitated them, reworking them at the studio. The opposite is also true. His training in academic realism and deep interest in landscape, human portraiture and form influenced his photographic choices and aesthetics. Many of his so-called ethnographic portraits—such as the faces of the Garhwali village women and men—testify to the fact. They are not what documentary photographs typically look like, but they are compelling and full of expression. The humanism based on the mimetic practice of realism connects his photographic practice to other branches of his artistic career.  

The most significant aspect of LM Sen's artistic career is his syncretic nature of practice, which allows diverse mediums, genres and styles to coexist and cohere. Despite his adherence to Indian nationalism, he avoided ideological dogmatism in his artistic practice, allowing creativity to express itself through as many channels as possible, whether Asian or Western. There are also photographs of objects and people, where he explored shadows and angles, emphasising the medium's unique power and specificity. To achieve desired images, he experimented with chemicals and negatives and used materials like clothes and textured glasses in his darkroom at Lucknow Art School.

The pictures of the indigenous tribal men and women make up the most significant part of his photographic archive. A close friend of the great anthropologist DN Majumdar and member of the Ethnographic and Folk Culture Society, UP, Sen’s photographs were informed by critical cultural and political understanding of the present. The portraits capture the subjects' expressions, emphasising their individuality and character, deconstructing both exoticism and the prevalent scientific gaze to look at them objectively as ethnographic species. 

Sen died in 1954, and people forgot him soon. The scholars of the later times also did not find his work easy to fit into their categories. However, he inspired generations of students in the art school. Apart from his experimental attitude, emphasis on medium-specificity and open aesthetic outlook, the deep humanism of his photographs and his subtlety to connect art with the world and spirit of the time make him relevant today. 

MV: Since the Children's Photography Archive (CPA) is the first of its kind, can you tell about how you realised there was a need to document children’s photography? What is the organisational principle behind such an archive, and how did you decide what to include in an exhibition?

Melissa Nolas: The idea for the Children’s Photography Archive originated from a European Research Council Connectors research grant I had for five years where I led an international team looking at children's encounters, experiences and engagements with what children understood as ‘public life.’ We gave inexpensive digital cameras to approximately forty-five children who were based across Hyderabad, India; Athens, Greece; and London, England; and asked them to take photographs of the things that mattered to them. My colleague Christos Varvantakis and I were also trying to find historical examples of photographers who had taken up the camera as children and began to research whether there were any archives of children's photographs. I asked many experts in the field who ought to have known, but they could not think of any such resource. When I realised it did not exist, I thought we should invent it! So we applied for and received a grant from the European Research Council to set up the Children's Photography Archive. And we went live as a legal entity in July 2021.

The research project resulted in 4500 photographs at the end of the three-and-a-half or four years that we spent with the children. The children selected some photographs and we, as researchers, selected others we thought were important in terms of framing stories that we had heard but which had not been photographed. So taking those two logics together, we came up with organisational categories. These categories have been created bottom-up, and I think it is one of the critical interventions that we have made to ensure that the child's gaze is at the centre of how the archive is organised.

The archive now also hosts two other research projects. These include a collection from Portugal by Verónica Policarpo, which looked at interspecies relationships specifically focusing on children, and Barbara Turk Niskač's collection that explores children's relationship to work and play in Slovenia. For the Chennai Photo Biennale, I found that just working with the child's gaze was a unifying way to bring together these geographically diverse collections. There were a number of photographs which were reflective images that featured the child, the camera and their reflection. I find such images very illustrative of concepts like the child’s gaze while simultaneously addressing ethical issues in creating an archive of children's photography. Working with minors, we have to think of how to protect the child’s identity without erasing them completely. These reflective photographs offer a middle ground because you cannot identify any of the children, but you can still see them there as artists behind the camera.

MV: Can you please tell us about the process of archiving the pandemic as an event that had both public and personal significance? How did you collaborate as a family to produce this archive?

Lisa Kereszi: I do not think we really set out to make a collaborative book or even to say that we were consciously documenting our experience (collective or individual) with the intent to share it with the public. We each just took pictures as part of our daily lives, trying to get by and find a moment of beauty or meaning or visual poetry. I think Ottie would just say something along the lines of what she said already—that she wants to take pictures of her toys and her food and her parents. But she does seem to have a need to preserve—when a toy or doll “setup” needs to be cleaned up and put away, it comforts her to have a record of it with a photograph. I think the act of recording and photographing and preserving something and feeling like we had control over something—even something small like making a picture—gave each of us, in our own way, some comfort.

Speaking for myself, I did what moms do—cook and garden and collect beach glass! And I photographed all of these things with my iPhone every day, mostly vertical. Ottie made her toys come to life and made screenshots of some of the apps she used to learn how to read by using a point-and-shoot Sony camera. And dad had us do miraculous, mysterious and performative things with masks and wigs and the dry ice from our seafood deliveries (he taught himself how to make sushi maki rolls) and recorded us with a higher-end digital camera and flash. 

Sure, we took pictures of our grocery delivery and sanitising it, our masks, and our quarantined mail, but this felt too obvious, on-the-nose, or documentary for the book, IN, that we made to publish our collaborative work. But we knew our experience stuck together in this big old house would resonate with others and that a child’s point of view of her increasingly shrinking world would echo and rhyme with the experiences that others had, too.

We envisioned a book or exhibit with our three bodies of work separated into three sections or volumes, or chapters. But our publisher did not see it that way and asked us if we would let him mix them all up and edit them together. I gave him edits of each of our work, and Ottie did not do her own edit, but we wanted a seasoned and experienced artist like ourselves to do that. After a couple of months, he presented us with his idea of our work jumbled up together—as authored by the family and not by three separate people. For Chennai, it is just our child’s work, but in the book, IN, it is all three of us. I think we each have a voice and a point of view, but I like the experimental quality of questioning authorship when we present the work all together.

MV: How does the photo archive become a starting point for a journey into the speculative? Can you tell us about how you have gone about activating the archive in Limits of Change?

Parvathi Nayar: I had long wanted to do a creative project with my father’s personal archives—his papers, photographs and videos. I was in my early twenties when my father, Maj Gen TNR Nayar died, and it was a shock. He left his papers to me, but it took me a long while to feel emotionally competent to read and process them.

Delving into the material and subsequent research highlighted how the story of the Custodian Force India (CFI) was a forgotten chapter of history—one that few knew about, yet one of immense significance. This is how I began work on Limits of Change over six years ago. I invited my niece, Nayantara, a playwright, to collaborate with me on this project. From the outset, I had felt that the story—rooted in both personal and historical archives—demanded a multidisciplinary approach. By interlacing fiction, fact and fable through theatre, art, video, the spoken word and text, we sought to create a layered and immersive experience within an imagined space we called “The Story Museum.” 

When I took the project to Director Dr Rathi Jafer, Director at InKo Centre, Chennai, she was struck by its layered aspects as we mixed archives, histories and fiction. InKo Centre Chennai commissioned and eventually presented Limits of Change. The visual archives of my father’s videos and family albums were critical. My father liked to make films on his 8 mm camera, recording his experiences. We watched these as home movies when I was little. Eventually the projector broke down, and he did not make more films after a certain point. For Limits of Change, I digitised the old videos. While some of the imagery was lost, it was incredible to see these videos that my father had shot in India and Korea in 1953 and 1954—offering a rich sense of time travel through his eyes.

There is also the archive of personal memories: I spoke to my mom about childhood memories, and she recollected being a bride at eighteen when her husband went off to Korea as part of the CFI. My father’s journey to Korea was a part of our family’s history—present, yet in the background, like a faint echo of another time.

Work and research on Limits of Change entailed a preliminary patching together of multiple archives. We did a lot of research in the Nehru Memorial Library, going through letters, official documents, articles and writings such as those by General Thorat. We talked to army officers and historians. I also tracked down a copy of General Thimmaya's memoirs from the General Thimmaya Trust in Bengaluru. Through them, we met Professor Ra from Korea, who is personally interested in this little-known aspect of Indo-Korean history and has translated General Thimmaya's memoirs into Korean.

In the end, all this archival information is contained and curated in different forms in the Story Museum, where Limits of Change is set. Small groups of people are led through nine rooms of this museum by a pair of curators played by talented Chennai actors. In these nine spaces, the work of historical fiction unfolds through art and performance, offering the audiences a deeply immersive and multi-sensory experience.

I like to think of the Story Museum as a place where the stories of ordinary people who lived through extraordinary times are recorded—a place that every city should have, where their archival histories are preserved.

MV: As a still photographer whose work documents Tamil cinema, T. Lakshmikantan’s personal archive is also public in its own way because it was used for publicity. How does the exhibition navigate the personal and the public?

Nirmal Rajagopalan: A large part of Lakshmikantan’s work was to take continuity shots so that people on set would know what to come back to when they revisited that particular sequence of shots. But his primary work was taking photographs for publicity purposes. This was in the pre-digital era. His images went into posters, hoardings, cassette covers, magazines and newspapers. It is a very personal archive in the sense that it is his personal work. But even today, whenever a movie that he shot is celebrating a significant milestone, somebody from either the production house or a media house that is writing about that movie will still reach out to Mr Lakshmikantan to request him for images. So a large part of his archive is still alive, partly because he still goes back to it every now and then to access an image from it for present-day publicity or for revisiting with a sense of nostalgia. It preserves the work that he has done, but it also continues to have a small role to play in everyday life.

Our access to his archive was actually very limited. Mr Lakshmikantan is now eighty-three-years-old and needs a lot of rest. So we engaged with his work within small windows of time. He has images of more than 200 movies, with 150 to 200 images per movie. These are all negatives because these are films from the 1970s through the 1990s. Though he worked till very recently, the last movie that he worked on was released in 2023. But those are digital, so I do not know where those archives sit. But he has got between 30,000 and 40,000 negatives still with him. We had access to literally ten movies, so maybe 1500–1600 negatives was all we could view within the window that we had access to him and his work. Unfortunately, this cluster did not have any behind-the-scenes (BTS) or any continuity shots. They were almost exclusively shots made for publicity or promotional purposes, not all of which were used. So the nature of the archive that we had access to was limited by time and by his health.

My approach to the archive is purely as somebody who is a big fan of Tamil cinema. It was an absolute joy to be able to look at his negatives. We just had a light box and a phone camera with the inversion mode turned on. This meant it was portable enough for us to take into his living room to look at these images in front of him. He would add a little bit of context every now and then. But for the most part, I am hoping that this is just the first part of this exercise and that we have the opportunity to extensively dig into his entire archive and sit down for a detailed, meaningful conversation with him about at least a handful of images, if not a handful of films.

For the exhibition at the biennale, I curated the selection from the point of view of the fan. What would I like to know as somebody who enjoys movies, trivia and history? Lakshmikantan’s archive is a place where all of these come together. The movies that he shot are far from unknown. And given how deeply ingrained a sense of film culture is here in Tamil Nadu, it made a lot of sense to take little hints or glimpses and show that to people. And people are very happy because it is triggering a sense of nostalgia and they are now revisiting those memories. The exhibition itself is very accessible and relatable for the average individual on the street. It has been set up in a large public park, in the middle of a very busy intersection. A big part of how we imagined it was that it should be an easy entry into the world of photography through a familiar lens of cinema.

The exhibition is a chance to celebrate not just the work of Lakshmikantan but also the role of the cinema still photographer. Our attempt was to showcase how there was another visual artist on those sets. And that this visual artist worked on some of the movies that you have all grown up loving, allowing you to look at them from a slightly different perspective. These were the kinds of conversations that I wanted to initiate. So, we hope that this is just step one in our interaction with this archive and that it will continue to grow in the future.

To learn more about the recently concluded edition of the Chennai Photo Biennale, read Kamayani Sharma’s short interviews with artists whose practices explore process, Mallika Visvanathan’s short interviews with artists whose practices explore memory and with the curators of the primary shows, Vishal George’s short interviews with artists whose practices explore urban landscapes and with artists whose practices explore the theme of labour and Anoushka Antonnette Mathews' short interviews with artists whose practices explore themes of mental health and neurodivergence and with artists whose practices explore themes of bodies and landscapes.