Immortal Impressions

Immortal Impressions explores legacy, memory and identity through the lens of my maternal Anglo-Indian family history, shining a light in the darker places of intergenerational trauma, as well as on the entangled history of India, photography and the West

Both of my Anglo-Indian grandparents on my mother’s side migrated to Britain after Indian independence. Both experienced colonial rule in India differently, yet shared the experience of existing between two cultures. My grandfather – the illegitimate son of a Scottish lord and his fifteen-year-old Anglo-Indian servant – was taken from his mother at the age of four-months-old and raised in an orphanage for mixed race ‘children of the Empire’, run by Scottish missionaries. Despite this start in life, he became a celebrated artist, who went on the paint portraits of the British Royal Family. My grandmother – the daughter of an Indian circus owner and a trapeze artist of mixed British and unknown Easten European descent– spent her early life travelling with the circus, relatively free from the stigma of her mixed-race background. But after her father died, she became estranged from her mother, who made it clear she didn’t want her new British neighbours to know she had a half Indian daughter.

Using the memories of my grandparent’s stories – as well as my own experience of my mixed heritage –as a starting point, I firstly revisited footage from a 16mm film that I shot ten years ago at my grandparents’ home, carefully selecting individual frames that spoke of these stories, memories and impressions and transforming them into still photographic prints. Secondly, I made ambrotypes in response to these images, which depict visitors to the Imperial War Museum peering into a 1940s dollhouse, a model of the kind of home my grandparents would have encountered when they migrated to the UK after independence. By making ambrotypes – ‘ambrotos’ meaning immortal; ‘typos’ meaning impression – I utilize the very same medium used by East India Company photographers to categorise, control and exoticise, to instead evoke the ghosts of imperialism that live on in my own home and those of others.

By combining these images and processes, I explore how personal and collective histories intermingle, how memory and identity bend, morph and distort over time, and how photography itself plays a role in such processes. Photography – a technology of power that was introduced to India by the British in the 1840s – becomes a means to explore my own connection to the colonial history of my ancestors; part memory, part fantasy, part longing, part mourning, and part discovery