In South Asia, the visual is deeply connected to history and culture, seeping into the subconscious through storytelling and mythmaking. The photograph and its recent accessibility, in digital and analog forms, mediate questions of identity, creating a space for personal inquiry and experimentation. Many photographers, writers, scholars, and visual anthropologists have chosen to organize themselves collectively to realign their positions with photography. The shared colonial past between India and the subcontinent, including Pakistan, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and Nepal, has caused underground histories to be forgotten, buried in the larger narratives of the land. Photographers have come together, over the last decade, to bring alternative histories to the forefront and make sense of the contemporary realities and geographies that seek to define them. New solidarities have emerged that allow for a retelling and a renegotiation of political histories that reference our colonized pasts—a retelling that seeks to upend expected stereotypes of one’s assumed identities.
What has surfaced from this resistance is a larger consortium that pushes the boundaries of what
