The Kashmir Valley Archive

Since the early 1990s, X, the collection owner, gathered hundreds of photographic prints and negatives sourced from local photographers, activists, and community members and supplemented visual documentation with contextual historical documentation such as newspaper clippings, books, and diaries. This rare material compilation documents many of the events of the 1990s, including the destruction wrought in Kashmiri villages and homes, protests, skirmishes, lockdowns, and funerals. Through this process of photographic archiving, as well as through annual exhibitions of a curated set of images from his collection, X mobilized the evidential, mnemonic, and affective qualities of the photographic medium as a form of visual activism and vernacular history-making. Users should approach this collection with an understanding that looking at these images is the beginning of the process of trying to make sense of the visual remnants of an ongoing long-term conflict in a region that has seen widespread erasure of material evidence.

To accomplish the work of safeguarding these materials, our team underwent training through local workshops held by the Nepal Picture Library and some virtual training in partnership with Toronto Metropolitan University Library. These efforts were important for local stakeholders to professionalize their archival practices and to explore a range of questions about how to build, sustain, and safeguard an archive. We believe this material will make an important contribution to an understanding of Kashmiri history writ large but also specifically the photographic representation of Kashmir at the local level. It will eventually become a vital and useful resource for community members and researchers.

The workshops explored the following three themes:

PHOTO-BASED RESEARCH

• What kind of research methodologies have you been applying to collect or archive?
• What are the relations of your photo-based research with more prominent forms of research, such as interviews, ethnographies, and so on?
• What does your research assume about why photos are made, used, and circulated?
• What are the questions that you think photos can answer or not answer? And how do you design your research based on these questions?

ARCHIVE-BUILDING

• What are the purposes and goals of your archive?
• What are your intentions in terms of the politics of memory or knowledge?
• How would you describe your role as an archivist? What do you think are your footprints on research, analysis, mediation, creation, circulation, etc.?
• What are the gaps your archive hopes to fill? And what are the gaps that continue in your archive?
• How do you deal with the questions of meanings, reasonings, and logics that your archive is generating?

CURATORIAL PRACTICES

• What are your strategies for display and dissemination?
• What are your tactics for attention?
• What are the contexts for the reception of your work? How do you build those contexts?
• How do exhibitions, events, or other forms of public display fit into your practice?
• How do you manage the entanglements of your archive with public struggles over knowledge, access, education, and information?
• What are the implications of your research or archive in terms of public life?