MEAP in the Classroom: Ahmed Hossain’s Anthropological Photographs

This year WAC 104 focused on the following practices: museum curation, photography, critical moving image media and ethnography. During weeks 4 and 5 the focus was on photography. The lectures during these weeks examined the history of photography and the emergence of specialized approaches including documentary and activist photography. The lectures also raised photography’s close ties with the history of colonialism and surveillance. With regard to this, two case studies were examined. One, focused on the practice of Orientalist photography. The second pertained to my research on the history of photography in northeast India.

In my discussion I raised the distinction between colonial administrative and missionary uses of photography in Northeast India during the 19^th and early-20^th centuries. At the end of this discussion, I shared the Ahmed Hossain Collection as a photographic practice that responds to the history of colonial photography in Northeast India.

I emphasized how Mr. Hossain’s collection is a vital body of material developed after Indian independence and discussed features of his approach that differ from the tropes for depicting Northeast India in colonial photography.

My discussion of this collection was divided into two parts. First, I shared how this project came about and how it was developed based on an emergent research methodology involving responses to the circumstances we faced in Assam, where the digitization took place. In the second part, I focused on the anthropological discourse underpinning Mr. Hossain’s images.