The Borrowed Archive: Collaborative Practices of the Kashmir Photo Collective

The collaborative practices of the Kashmir Photo Collective – a digital archive populated by photographic collections and historical material originating in the Kashmir Valley – are essential to the challenge that they present to conventional conceptions of family archives and especially to the pedagogical and scholarly potential of family photographs. For KPC, collaboration begins in the homes of the Kashmiri families where the collections are digitised, the space to which KPC returns repeatedly for gathering image context. This paper will reveal how memories – which appear as fragmented narratives during the archival act – are transformed through handwritten inscription by the archivist, and why this mode of memory-making allows the agency of the borrowed archive to remain with the progenitor of the album.