What does it take to build a community photo archive?

Photographs from the Darjeeling-Sikkim region have long been concentrated in institutional and private collections, often far from where they were made. These collections predominantly reinforce colonial and elite narratives, centring imperial administrators, and European travellers and monarchies, and so offer an incomplete visual history of the region. Alongside them are vernacular photographs that are largely absent from formal repositories but preserve the personal histories and collective memories central to the region.

These images live in family albums, carried alongside the oral…