Photos: How archivists are helping preserve family legacies
Memories fade. But memories also live in old images, vintage objects and heritage homes. Now a host of services are
Memories fade. But memories also live in old images, vintage objects and heritage homes. Now a host of services are helping families preserve their tangible and intangible heirlooms, in the form of illustrated novels, photo albums and videos. We take a look at two – Calcutta Houses which makes photos and videos of the city’s crumbling heritable structures that give Kolkata its character; Past Perfect scans through photos, anecdotes and heirlooms to create historical fiction (on request) for families that have dramatic flashes of memories, but a dearth of detail.
Calcutta Houses was initially an Instagram page run by Manish Golder, Sidhartha Hajra and Sayan Dutta. They scoured the city and archived heritage homes, some dating to the early 1800s, others as recent as the Art Deco trend of the 1960s, many that would not be around much longer. Last year they got their first request to document in details a family home that they had featured on their page. Golder has now been commissioned to archive a 200-year-old ancestral home called Barrister Babur Bari (Barrister’s Home; seen here).(Image Courtesy: Calcutta Houses)
2/6
Barrister Babur Bari (Barrister’s Home) has been housed by the same family since before the Revolt of 1857. It is characterised by its large courtyard, arched corridors and slatted French windows (seen here). It is the ancestral home of Krishnakali Basu (Mitra), a Gurgaon-based theatre artiste who is struggling to hold out against it being sold, demolished and replaced by a high-rise.(Image Courtesy: Calcutta Houses)
3/6
Barrister Babur Bari (Barrister’s Home) is a three-storey, 17-room mansion, which is not easy to maintain. Krishnakali Basu (Mitra) is hoping, through this documentation by Calcutta Houses, she will be able to get the larger public interested in this structure, and find the support she needs to save the house.(Image Courtesy: Calcutta Houses)
Past Perfect specialises in turning historical accounts of clients into create novels or illustrated works of historical fiction. One of the projects they are working on currently is a four-part series on the family legacy of entrepreneur Aditya Gupta. Gupta can trace his family back six generations and has fascinating stories to tell, about relatives who died during the Revolt of 1857; about a great-grand uncle who was a revolutionary, and a grandmother who travelled alone to London to study at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Images like the one seen here, during a birthday celebration in Hyderabad, and many others serve as source material for the book series.(Image Courtesy: Past Perfect)
5/6
Past Perfect was set up 2016, as a corporate archiving service, by Deepti Anand and Sanghamitra Chatterjee. It has since evolved to offer clients a service that fills in the gaps, so to speak. Where there is a dearth of detail – in photographs or memories – they offer fictionalised accounts with the help of content writers. Seen here is a coffee table book they made for entrepreneur George Mathews, for his 70th birthday.(Image Courtesy: Past Perfect)
10
Modus Vivendi (1000 people – 1000 Homes), 2000: In this self-portrait, a work of mixed media on canvas, Kallat appears as a swaggering, bespectacled juggler of heart and brain. The painting is an exploration of selfhood in the city of Mumbai, where he grew up and lives. The individual, lost in the multitudes, wanders in a state of perpetual disorientation, as reflected in the work. The radiating streaks of red, orange and green, reminiscent of thermal imagery, were achieved by texturing the canvas with layers of paint or canvas and then peeling off some parts to attain the desired visual effect.
5
Sheer delight: While out surveying the remote Phoenix Islands Archipelago, Schmidt Ocean Institute scientists captured rare footage of a “glass octopus”, named so because it is completely see-through. What one does see when one shines a light on it is its optic nerve, eyeballs, and digestive tract. Even though this species has been known to science since 1918, scientists were forced to study about this animal through specimens found in the guts of predators, before this sighting.
7
Herald / Harbinger is a permanent public art installation by Ben Rubin and Jer Thorp. It broadcasts the sounds of the Bow Glacier cracking and breaking 200 km away, to the centre of Calgary, one of Canada’s largest cities, almost in real time. The sounds and imagery shaped by data from a glacial observatory are broadcast through 16 speakers and seven LED arrays.
10
Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022): The movie explores the many dimensions of parenthood and love through the story of a Chinese-American immigrant named Evelyn Wang (played by Michelle Yeoh) who, while struggling to run a failing laundromat business, uses her newfound powers to travel across multiple realities to save the world and work on her strained relationships with her loved ones. It’s a family drama that’s fast-paced, funny and, above all, tackles earnestly the idea of healing from intergenerational trauma.
6
At first sight: For centuries, sunspots were thought to be Mercury passing across the Sun. By the early 17th century, with the invention of the telescope, astronomers could get a clearer look. In 1610, Galileo Galilei (who first used the telescope to observe space) in Italy and his British contemporary Thomas Harriot identified these as spots on the Sun. Seen here are 35 drawings of sunspots created by Galileo between June 2 and July 8, 1612.
