What we carry back

“What we carry back” is an ongoing body of work that traces memory through the physical remains of my family's archive. Centred on my grandmother's ancestral home in Tamil Nadu, in India, the project brings together contemporary colour photographs made on medium-format film with family albums, handwritten records, and vernacular photographs preserved across generations.

I approach my family archive as a living object rather than from a historical perspective. Creases, fading, handwritten annotations, worn album pages, and the sequencing of photographs become as significant as the images themselves. Contemporary photographs echo, interrupt, and extend these inherited materials, collapsing distinctions between past and present.

The work considers how memory is not only contained within photographs, but also carried through the material surfaces that preserve them. Family albums become spaces where absence, ritual, care, and repetition coexist, while new photographs inhabit the same emotional and physical terrain.

By moving between archival photographs and contemporary film images, “What we carry back” explores photography as an object of touch, inheritance, and belonging, asking how photographs continue to gather meaning as they are handled, preserved, and passed between generations.

Deepthi Muralibabu is part of »Guest Room: Whitney Hubbs & Jermaine Francis«.