“The advent of photography in India marked the beginning of a deeply imaginative form of visual representation, penetrating almost every aspect of the religious, cultural and courtly life,” says Jérôme Bonnafont, Ambassador of France to India.

The show spans the early bourgeois pursuit of photography as a hobby for the elite to its entry into journalistic documentation; it also touches upon the more artistic side of the genre while highlighting some brilliantly aesthetic frames by the likes of Umrao Singh Sher-Gil, (1889-1949) one of India’s first photo enthusiasts who documented the life of his family and his daughter, Amrita Sher-Gil. There are works of the legendary photo-journalist Henri Cartier Bresson who elevated the business of recording the everyday to an art form.

The next generation of photographers share their politics of image making, in the ’70s and ’80s and we get a feast of imagery as lens-man Pablo Bartholomew digs into his personal archive retrieving forgotten negatives, reviving for us the grey, scratched treasures of a floating world rising out of the mists of his youth.

A glimpse into Dayanita Singh’s photo-journal, Sent a Letter, provides us with a travelogue that has the quality of the original hand-made diary that Singh crafted for herself and a friend. Noni Singh’s work features an enthralling series titled The Album of my Husband’s Girlfriends—a selection of photographs she discovered in an old trunk when she moved in with her one-time-Casanova husband.