ARTICLE
Indian Memory Project
Founded in 2010 by photographer Anusha Yadav, Indian Memory Project is an online archive of photographs and narratives sourced from the personal archives of Indians, largely run out of Mumbai, though it does not have a permanent physical presence. The Project is an ongoing initiative and promotes the idea of openness, access and the sharing and restoration of collective memory.
Yadav initially started the Project as a blog, which soon gained traction in the press and began to grow through crowdfunding and the contributors of friends and patrons. The visual archive’s underlying narrative soon became a repository of various traditions, lifestyles and social situations. The project operates on empathy and captures the tangible and the intangible cultural heritage of Indian society through a collection of over three hundred visual narratives, predominantly in sepia and black-and-white. It encourages individuals to share photographs and documents made within the subcontinent from before 1992. Once the contributors share their collections, the team carries out a rigorous fact-checking and translation process.
Related to her work on the Project, Yadav, in 2015, curated the exhibition The Photograph is Proof at the Format International Photography Festival, Derby, UK, presenting a history of criminal investigations in the Indian subcontinent in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through archival photographs. In its current form, the Project reaches a global audience and allows access to heritage material that would otherwise be stored and locked in institutional archives.
Bibliography
“About Us.” n.d. Indian Memory Project. https://www.indianmemoryproject.com/about/
“About” n.d. Anusha Yadav. https://anushayadav.com/about/
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