All Grants | Cycle 2 –
Suryanandini Narain is an Assistant Professor of Visual Studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. She has written extensively on photography in India, especially around themes of women, the family, the home and the studio photography, in publications including Marg, Art India, Visual Anthropology Review, Trans Asia Photography Review and others.
Narain’s research examines women as subjects, makers, viewers, carers and archivists of photobooks in the South Asian context. She also examines how women’s duties as caregivers for their families and domesticity extend to the preservation of family photographs and albums, as they narrativize and perpetuate personal memories through images. She extends her argument to show affinities between family albums and photobooks authored by women, challenging the separation between a personal mnemonic document and a professional, artistic work.
* This research grant was supported by Dayanita Singh. It is for a researcher residing in India and addressing the history of the photobook in India.
Links
Profile Links
Suryanandini Narain Academia Profile
Faculty Page at Jawaharlal Nehru University
Publication Links
Framing Portraits, Binding Albums: Family Photographs in India. Shilipi Goswami and Suryanandini Narain, eds. (Zubaan, 2025).
“Housing Images: Books, Objects and Museums in the Home/Archive” in Oikography: Homemaking through Photography. Ali Shobeiri and Helen Westgeest, eds. (Leiden Publication, 2025).
“A Feminine Archive: Women Albums and Photobooks in India 2025” in Photographies (2025).
“‘Seeing’ Family through Wedding Albums” in Family Studies. Anuja Agrawal, ed. (Oxford University Press, 2024).
Other Links
10×10 Research Grant Presentation Video (Suryanandini Narain—00:31:40)
Summary of Research Supported by 10×10 Photobooks Grant:
Visualising Home: Domestic Visual Culture in India, with a Focus on Family Albums as Photobooks Preserved by Middle-Class Women
My ongoing, long-term research concerns analogue photographic albums made by women in India, in post-independence and contemporary periods. As a precursor to the impulse of making photobooks in the contemporary art context, the family album ensconces quotidian material and visual elements that are widely available to its makers, producing diversified articulations across methods and media of bookmaking. These albums evidence the often-overlooked desires of middle-class women, their self-fashioning, domesticity and sexuality that remain embedded within larger, patriarchal family narratives. I look at makers who range across being educated ‘housewives’ or ‘homemakers’, to those in full time employment outside of the home, as well as the professional contemporary artist photo book maker.
These album makers may or may not be wielders of the camera, yet they are thecompilers and keepers of images and emergent narratives in oral and written forms.Framed as individual portraits, bound into ornate albums and photobooks, or hidden away in books, cup boards, boxes and bundles, these photographs appear in many forms, expanding the idea of what a photo book might be. I examine how the album as image-object is woven into the domestic fabric of homes, constructing feminine identity, functioning as a reminder of ordinary events and rites of passage. I question the expectations from the display of photobooks, looking instead at more intimate, accidental or deliberate contexts within which family images are serialized and kept hidden or seen in plain view. What are the major shifts in photobook making that women have espoused in the digital age? How do social media spaces de-materialize the photobook, and what is the new feminine consciousness regarding the global circulation of private family photographs?
Centrally, how do women as the kingpins of families and archivists of family albums negotiate their own positions and perspectives within larger narratives of family, community and nation?
I have previously researched and published an essay on women’s holiday albums (in Belden-Adams and Trent eds. 2022) as a specific category within the genre of photobooks. These albums reflect the aspirations of westward bound, single women from India, who subvert the historical idea of the east-bound, white, male explorer. Their albums do not reflect ‘home’ and ‘away’ as exclusionary domains, as they carry their domesticity with them on their travels. I also look at domestic travel albums by women who despite familial responsibilities and financial constraints fulfil their desire to explore India’s national cartography, their readings and affective insights precipitating in visually complex albums ( in Framing Portraits, Binding Albums: Family Photographs in India; eds. Goswami and Narain, Zubaan, 2025). I have observed how a single family can have contesting visual narratives through different photobooks that spread across media, context and authorship, diversifying micro histories in myriad ways. As such, the album is at once a personal mnemonic device for the lives and recollections of women in moments that exist outside of daily, male dominated discourses, while offering parallel micro-histories of intimate cultures of domesticity that remain undiscovered.