Book Excerpt from the Introduction of the Book Unframed: Speculating Image Practices in South Asia

The conceptualization of Unframed rests on my role as archivist-curator-custodian of an image archive (The Alkazi Collection of Photography).

Almost two decades of this multifaceted work has mandated continual reflection on the processes of selection, aggregation, re-classification, and preservation of images, and continually enables me to marvel at the re-emergence of obscured or subjugated historical traces and trajectories. Regular immersion in a large historical visual archive has undoubtedly influenced the way I have structured this volume on South Asian lens-based practices and image spectra. Hence they traverse multiple chronologies (past, present, future, and the erasure of time schemes in the virtual domain); multiple mappings (inhabited/uninhabited spaces, landscapes, built forms, and the spectral edifices of photons and pixels); multiple rhetorics (political, cultural, aesthetic, methodological, existential, symbolic); and multiple subjectivities (social, singular, hybrid). The navigation of these mingled modes has become reflexive within my thinking and has proved immensely useful in the intimidating task of selecting the material of appropriate breadth, depth, and complexity for this volume, which I have envisioned as the first of a two- or three-part series.