The Naga Photo Archive seeks to collect, document, archive and disseminate photographs from family and personal photo collections of people from the Naga areas of Northeast India. The Archive is currently focussing on collecting photos from the 1940s to the 1990s – the years before independence, of the Naga movement, of Statehood and the years of conflict till the cease-fire in 1997.

How did people and families record themselves and their lives through those years? We try to look at old photographs not just as photographs, but as historical documents. For us, it is interesting to see how Naga history is written and talked about through these photographs. They may seem very banal, very mundane, very every day, but they were actually captured during some of the most formative years of Naga history.

Much has been written about the Naga nationalist movement, many books have been published by anthropologists on the warrior Nagas or the tribalistic practices of the Nagas. But very little has been written about the ordinary lives of the Nagas. They went through the 1960s and 70s, they had an imagination of the larger world. They wanted to create something for themselves which we never read about, never hear. What are these narratives and how do they intersect with the other dominant ways in which the Nagas have been represented over history?

This is what the Naga Photo Archive aims to do - to look at these histories, these photographs and what they contain, and how they converse with the larger history of the Nagas.