Series: Open Knowledge Fellowship 2025
Have archival photographs ever looked back at you? Dragged you into its frames? Made you pause not just to see, but to feel, to guess, to remember, or to imagine? There is a strange alchemy when one is looking at colonial photographs. A photograph can certainly freeze time. It can, however, also disrupt time. It can transport, evoke, disorient, and even deceive. This essay is about that moment of evocation. What happens when you look at an archival photograph, and it begins to speak? Or worse, when it refuses to.
Rather than treating photographs as mere documents, this essay reads them as textured carriers of people, posture, memory, and place.
To reflect on this idea, I look at archival photographs capturing the family and life of Kerala in the 1900s (1929-1964) – starting with Allen Campbell McKay, whose albums span from 1929 to 1930. As “a Scotsman” who moved to Kerala for work (as an assistant accountant), he maintained detailed visual albums of his (and in general) life in Kerala. Images by his photographer-companion, R. V. Kamath, are hard to miss within his collection. I also turn to engage with Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf’s ethnographic photographs. Housed at the SOAS Archives, Haimendorf’s visuals of Kerala from the 1940s and 50s document people and communities with a structured, anthropological gaze.
It is by situating these collections against my paternal grandfather, C. B. Menon’s, personal collection of photographs that I examine the overlap. Working in British Borneo as an engineer (till 1964), he was, like McKay, quietly obsessed with representing his family in frames…
Photographs: where the personal and colonial converge
The collage above brings McKay’s colonial and my grandfather’s personal worlds together. Women cradling babies; children posing during birthday celebrations; swimmers emerging; a group of marching Boy Scouts. There are buildings, parades, moments of leisure and labour, all scattered like fragments of memory waiting to be reassembled. These photographs are deliberately merged without attribution. There are no names, no captions, no certainty about who clicked what. And, in this erasure, lies the central invitation of the essay: What do we see? Can the image speak for itself? Can it speak for someone else?
By obscuring the photographers’ identities, the collage becomes a threshold.
It becomes a site where visual histories – personal and colonial – overlap. We are not being asked to decode intent but to respond to presence. Looking at this set of photographs, I ask: What happens when visuals are untethered from authorship? What remains legible? What is felt, evoked, or recalled? These questions shape the journey of this essay, one that moves through themes of posture, memory, curiosity, and place. Anchored in photographs by McKay, Haimendorf, and my grandfather, this is not simply a story of archives. It delianates how photographs can quietly rearrange the way we remember, and more importantly, the way we look.
People and Postures in Archival Photographs
Photographic postures speak volumes, not only about the subject or the photographer, but about the social codes (and hierarchies) at play. One image from Haimendorf’s archive labelled as “Nayar family, Kerala” (1953?), captures a multi-generational family (structurally positioned in rows) posing before a shaded, outdoor backdrop. There is a hierarchical symmetry to the composition with elders seated at the centre, surrounded by women in traditional sarees, some holding children, others with their hands gently resting by their sides. The men stand behind, shirted. Everyone looks directly into the camera.
This is a picture that one often finds in their family archives. So did I – a photograph taken by my grandfather in 1957 (just four years later). This photo, of my grandmother’s family, frames four generations outside our ancestral house. Both images, one ethnographic, one familial, follow a similar symmetry of belonging.
It was not the name of the photographer that mattered, but the choices of posture, arrangement, and gesture. They become performances of kinship: a visual declaration of who belonged to whom, and who stood where. Even with their different origins, they reminded me of something deeply personal: the experience of being gathered, of being asked to “stand still” for the camera, of knowing the photograph was meant to outlive the moment.
Holding and Seeing
Titled “Irula woman holding a monkey,” Haimendorf’s photograph (left) presents a straightforward yet visually layered moment: a girl holds a monkey, with a nondescript hut in the background. A similar image exists amidst my grandfather’s collection (right): my aunt, aged six or seven, stands in a garden with a cat held against her side.
These photographs share a similar visual arrangement (but a different intent). In both frames, it is the act of ‘holding’ that bridges the two worlds. One photograph belongs to an ethnographer’s archive, the other to a family album; in both, the human subject holds an animal not as a prop, but as part of a pre-existing relationship. While Haimendorf’s photograph situates the Irula woman within a larger ethnographic project, the one in the family album carries none of that burden. It remains uncatalogued, uncaptioned and is held together only by a vague memory: “that could have been our cat”.
Objects as Anchors: Looking at Everyday Memory in Colonial Photographs
In another photograph by Haimendorf – “Children going to school in Kerala” – it is not the overall scene, but the small material cues embedded within it that draw (my) attention. The girl at the end of the line holds a tiered metal lunchbox (ചോറ്റുപാത്രം), the kind still used in homes today with little variation in design. A little to her front, a boy walks with a shoulder bag (പുസ്തക/ കൈ സഞ്ചി), not unfamiliar in today’s landscape of canvas totes. These items are instantly recognisable, even without captions.
The children look directly at the camera with smiles. Whether or not the photograph was posed remains unclear, but their gaze acknowledges the photographer’s presence. The uneven path (വരമ്പ്) they walk on is in a rural setting and unmarked by any visible school building. What surfaced as I studied the image was not a memory of the location, but of stories my grandmother once told of going to school; of their daily act of walking as both routine and rite.
Objects in images can operate as visual anchors. They don’t need captions to be recognised; we identify them through use.
Through these everyday objects, a photograph reaches across time, linking the archival and the remembered not through spectacle, but through the familiarity of what is carried, and how. Their persistence across generations comes not from being photographed but from repetition of use and their continued presence in today’s kitchens, compounds, and memories.
The people pictured did not draw me to the above frames. It was, rather, what they were doing and using. The photographs offered no names, yet the gestures remained instantly readable: a hand pressed down and the foot steadying the coconut. These acts of recognition are not always analytical; they begin in the body, in the inherited ability to identify something by its shape, its placement, its purpose. In that quiet moment of noticing, when you can say “that’s an അമ്മിക്കല്ല് (ammikkallŭ),” or “that’s a പാര (pāra),” memory begins to return, not as a narrative, but as knowledge carried through form.
From Archive to Inquiry: Reading Photographs as Questions
The collage above, drawn from Haimendorf’s collection, shows three architectural views: a Nayar tharavād and a laterite shrine in upland Kerala. I do not have direct memories of these spaces. Yet, the wooden columns, recessed thresholds, half-lit courtyards, and verandahs feel partially familiar. These images do not recall memory exactly, but evoke the memory of something remembered: old Malayalam films, stories I’ve heard, visits to temples.
The tharavād interiors, with their open verandahs, centre-courtyards, wall-portraits, and exposed beams, recall conversations about ancestral homes – of spaces that we speak about more often than seen. The modest shrine, built into the landscape, reminds me of ancestral rituals described in fragments.
These photographs do not affirm the past through recognition; instead, they trigger questions.
What remains of these spaces? Have their forms persisted, quietly reabsorbed into daily life? Or do they exist now only as typologies in the archive? Looking at them, I do not feel nostalgic – just unsure. But that uncertainty becomes a starting point. It is from this place of unresolved familiarity that the photograph begins to probe, asking not what we remember, but what we might have missed.
Some photographs insist on curiosity.
One image among the two pages dedicated to Tripunitura and Ernakulam temple festivities in McKay’s album (dedicated to photographs by R. V. Kamath) does exactly this. A procession of three caparisoned elephants moves through a dense crowd. With no clear temple frontage, identifiable street corner, or indication of the purpose, it withholds familiarity.
It is this absence that became central to how I, as a local to Tripunitura, read it. An absence that probed enquiries and oral memories. There were guesses: perhaps a smaller procession prior to the main one, a now-defunct ritual, or a community-sponsored event. Nothing definitive surfaced. Though the photograph had slipped past a collective recognition and suspended in a concrete meaning, it remains compositionally rich. In this case, the photograph’s longevity lies not in its ability to affirm known histories. But lies in its capacity to provoke new questions. It invites speculation alongside the research. It does not function as a document of the familiar, but as a catalyst for inquiry.
Photographs as an archival witness
The above photograph – “Mr Ross Munro stood here and saw the rescue launch approach” (McKay, 1929) – highlights the very act of looking. The image frames two men overlooking the landscape at Irinjalakuda, the site of the 1924 floods. The image, however, is not about water or land. It is about looking. It is about the viewpoint. It is about re-creating a moment of witnessing. Mr Munro is no longer watching over the rescue; it is McKay standing at the place that once witnessed Mr Munro’s actions; remembering.
The photograph thus performs remembrance, staging a return: we are not only looking at history, but also witnessing someone looking at history. It is through this doubling that photographs remind us of our position as viewers, often tardy and translating.
To look at archival photographs is not to unlock a sealed truth, but to engage in a layered conversation. Some gestures are deliberate, others accidental, yet all carry weight. They show who stood where, who watched whom, and who was allowed to be seen. And in looking back at them, whether through the eyes of a young girl carrying a monkey or an old man staring into a floodplain, we begin to understand the elasticity of time and the persistence of image.
In the end, perhaps that is what photographs do best – blur the line between remembered and forgotten, known and unknowable. They do not simply show the past but invite us to stand within it, if only for a moment, and look around.
