Photographic archives are repositories of possibility. For myself, they are a store of images that appear to narrate, in ways unmatched by any other historical record, the trajectories of my own family’s migration from Kerala to Bombay to Tokyo, and later my immigration from Japan to the United States. For immigrants of East, Southeast, and South Asian descent in the United States, archives are where we turn to see ourselves reflected and preserved in the historical record. But what we often find in public archives are images that render us as strangers, or as spectacles on display. We see objects to be gawked at, our dark faces obscured in portraits where immigrants are identified by turbans, topis, braids, and kimonos.
By contrast, the family photo-album operates as a kind of domestic archive, an accumulation of pictures that intimately documents immigrant life outside of the public eye. At the same time,
