“FAMILY PHOTOS TELL SUCH A COMPLEX STORY ABOUT THE VALLEY”
ALISHA SETT 28, Writer and Co-Founder, Kashmir Photo Collective, Mumbai and London
Sometimes it just clicks. That’s exactly what happed with 28-year-old Alisha Sett, who is a writer and cofounder of the Kashmir Photo Collective, a digital archive that aims to create an alternative photographic history of the Kashmir Valley. It invites individuals and families, photo studios and photographers, as well as institutions to contribute their photographs and stories to the archive. “In my final year (2011-2012) at Tufts University, I was part of the Programme for Narrative and Documentary Practice run by Gary Knight and Samuel James. It was an in-depth immersion in documentary photography and writing. It was an inspirational environment and I decided to keep shooting after graduating,” says Sett. When KPC launched in 2014, she stopped shooting and started focusing on an archival and collaborative approach to photography. “Family photographs told such a complex story about the Valley, one which we don’t get in mainstream media and working together with the families to think about how their stories should be framed has been a huge learning experience,” says Sett, who curated her first exhibition in 2017 for the Focus Photography Festival She was an awarded an Edmond J. Safra Network Fellowship from the Safra Centre for Ethics at Harvard University in 2013-2014 to work on a photographic and ethnographic project on psychology and psychiatry in Kashmir. Coincidentally, she ended up living in Srinagar with one of the oldest photography families in the country, the Mahattas. As she spent more time in the Mahatta Studio on the bund she looked through their albums—and they have an incredible collection there, which is soon going to be available as a museum and realised that there was an entire history of the Valley there. Around the same time she met Nathaniel Brunt, a photographer who had begun searching for existing images that told intimate untold stories. They began discussing creating a digital archive that would preserve this material. The final impetus was the floods of 2014.
She was always a writer. Now, her primary focus is art history and art criticism. Two editors, Gauri Vij at The Hindu and Avtar Singh at the Indian Quarterly, gave her four things most writers can’t get: confidence, time to write, space to be published, and an income.