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Paper short abstract:

Through the lens of a photography exhibition, this paper examines how photographic practices amongst the Parsis – a minority community in India – both challenge and enrich anthropological discourse and reveal new forms of visual representation.

Paper long abstract:

This paper considers how photographic practice can provoke anthropological reflections, specifically in the case of a community on the brink of disappearance. Drawing on the experience of being an anthropologist-as-curator (Sansi, 2020) for a photography exhibition on the Parsis (a minority community within India), this paper presents ethnographic data on how photographs can critically act as emergent spaces of unfolding possibilities.

The exhibition, held at a contemporary art gallery in Mumbai, sought to present new types of visual representation for a community experiencing a dramatic population decline due to low nuptiality, strict endogamy and high emigration. Integrating research from ethnographic fieldwork that highlighted how millennial Parsis engage in experimental photographic practices to fashion their identity, the exhibition emphasised the importance of “play” as a conceptual loosening of societal expectations around representation. In this context, curatorial decisions around the presence or absence of captions to accompany photographs, the materiality of physical photographs versus images on a screen, and choices around framing or “unframing” were considered from anthropological perspectives.

This paper proposes that it is the complex temporalities embedded within photographs themselves that spark an important relinquishing of reliance on established categories of anthropological analysis. In bridging the past, present and future, photography’s intricate reordering of time provides a space for the development of experimental approaches within anthropology and curation. Overall, this paper highlights the potential of photography, in particular its inherent temporality, to foster new forms of knowledge that decentre and destabilise, thereby also signalling new directions in anthropological discourse.