NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati, visual art expert from Kathmandu, Nepal, has said that family photo albums illustrate alternative histories.
She was talking on ‘Archive Building and Alternative Histories at The Age of the Photographer 2022’ at a day-long seminar organised by the Kerala Lalithakala Akademi in association with Japan Foundation and Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Bengaluru, in Kochi on Saturday.
The seminar marked the culmination of ‘Tohoku - Through the Eyes of Japanese Photographers’, a photography exhibition held at the Akademi’s Durbar Hall Art Gallery.
Ms. Kakshapati presented pages from the old family photo albums of Sasikala Sarma and Prathibha Suvedi, two senior journalists in Nepal, to explain her point. Speaking on the ‘Idea of Loss and Visual (Mis)representation’, filmmaker R.V. Ramani said, “Every photograph is a nail on the coffin of our past.”
Presenting her paper on ‘Images in Translation’, Sarasija Subramanian from Reliable Copy said, “The stress on the visual being essential to publishing has been one that has guided us, as images play a key role in not only the circulation of information but also in the collection and sourcing of information from different histories and geographies.”
Lalithakala Akademi Chairman Murali Cheeroth said the cultural body was committed to holding cultural and social interactions and programmes with like-minded bodies in India and abroad, and the photography exhibition was the beginning of such exchange programmes.
