Life
“All artists really do just one work. We just break it into names—poem, story, documentary, photograph. But deep down, it is all the same gesture.”
— Vinod Kumar Shukla
I have been thinking about this sentence a lot. It came back to me one quiet afternoon as I stood in front of a cupboard filled with old family photo albums. For the first time in a long time, I was not rushing toward a deadline. I had time. And in that pause, I found myself reaching for the past.
The best place to begin, I thought, was with what had already been seen.
We keep our memories stored in albums. Some are covered in dust. Some are split at the spine. But all of them hold something vital: proof that we were here. That someone cared enough to press a shutter, save a print, slide it behind plastic. I used to think albums belonged to another generation. Now, I see them as a kind of quiet inheritance.
I hated photography as a child.
Not because I didn’t value it, but because I couldn’t do it. My father brought home a Pentax K1000 from Japan, and with it came a kind of ritual. He would ask me to look through the viewfinder, to align two semicircles in the center. He said, "That’s how you make the photo sharp." But no matter how hard I tried, I never saw what he was talking about. Everything was a blur. No one knew then that my eyesight was poor. Not even me.
The photos I took came out of focus. Film was expensive. Slowly, the camera stopped being passed to me. I did what was expected. I stood still. I smiled. I tried not to blink.
But the albums never stopped.
Even when the camera was not in my hands, its work continued. My father took photographs of everything, not just weddings or festivals, but everyday life. My mother feeding us. My brother and I curled up on a sofa. The light falling through the window during an ordinary breakfast. These images became our archive.
Back then, I didn’t understand why guests would spend hours flipping through pages of photos when they visited. They would laugh at the details, recall stories, point at faces I had forgotten. I wanted to go outside and play. Memory, I thought, was something adults liked to waste time with.
Now I find myself sitting with the same albums, lingering over the same pages.
Chapter 1 - Blue Album
The blue album is the beginning.
It is the largest of them all. Wrapped in a textured blue cover with red block letters that read Album of Memories. Beneath it, a line that reads "All times whenold are good"
I believe it came from Japan, just like the camera. And it holds what I now think of as Chapter Zero of our family archive.
Inside are photographs of my grandparents, the only way I know what they looked like. My parents’ wedding. The earliest pictures of me and my brother. School group photographs, where we still play the game of spotting ourselves in the crowd. Photos from trips taken with my father's friends. Images of our cousins. Nothing is arranged chronologically. It is not designed to tell a neat story. It is simply what it is: an act of gathering. Wherever there was space, a photograph found its place.
And somehow, it still feels whole.
Memory does not need order.
That blue album is not curated. It is instinctive. Raw. Beautiful in the way only real things are. It ends with photos of my father in Japan, standing in front of a castle or behind plates of Japanese dishes, younger than I ever knew him to be. In some way, it feels like both a beginning and an end.
There is a stretch of years with no photographs at all. A silent patch in the archive. I do not know when exactly my father stopped taking pictures. Maybe it was the rise of digital photography. Maybe it was life. Maybe he simply no longer needed the camera.
But something paused. And years later, something restarted. This time, with me.
Photograph from my parents wedding
This project is not just about photographs. It is about returning.
It is about seeing what I once ignored. It is about acknowledging that even blurry images can hold truth. That photography is not always about perfection or intent. Sometimes it is just about presence.
The Blue Album is the first chapter in a longer story I am trying to tell. A story about memory, about inheritance, about how the quiet act of seeing can pass from one generation to the next. Through film. Through print. Through silence.
We may stop making albums. But the need to remember never really goes away.
Chapter 1 - Blue Album