In her mammoth undertaking The‘Archival Gaze’, art critic and curator Gayatri Sinha underlines how photography preserves history and how documenting photography’s evolution is a way of documenting history. The publication captures the aesthetic and documentary aspects of photography and how it moved from the salon to newspaper columns to curated exhibitions. 

Sinha prioritises the archival over the historical and emphasises the visual and informal metaphor of a timeline over a linear chronology. The book is peppered with interesting anecdotes about eminent personalities, like Amrita Sher-Gil, Cornelia Sorabjiee, MK Gandhi, and Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad, among others, and how their personal and public photographs profoundly influenced the social, cultural and political climate of their time.

The rare archival photographs drawn from museums, private collections, archives, newspapers, and from the photographers themselves have been preserved and printed in their original colour to comprehensively navigate the reader through photography’s rich history.