A reluctant archive: reflections on archival fieldwork in Dhaka, Bangladesh

Abstract

Based on long-term fieldwork at and around the Drik Picture Library, an independent photographic archive in Dhaka, Bangladesh, this paper explores the realities of life and work at what might be considered a ‘counter-archive’ (Appadurai 2003) or ‘radical archive’ (Geismar 2021). I make a case for the ethnographic study of archives, not just as repositories of documents, images, and objects, but as dynamic and lived sites of both knowledge production and of everyday life and work. I argue that attending to these everyday life-worlds through sustained ethnographic engagement can illuminate the nuanced negotiations and contestations that shape the political and futural imaginaries, as well as practical concerns, of those involved in the making and maintaining of such archives. Emerging in response to an absence of state photographic archives, the Drik Picture Library in Dhaka has been collecting, archiving, and circulating photographic material for over thirty years, against a backdrop of increasingly restrictive state narrations of what Mohaiemen has termed ‘shothik itihash’ or correct history (2014). My own fieldwork in Dhaka was carried from 2023-2024, unexpectedly culminating with the ‘monsoon revolution’ of July 2024. I take this moment of upheaval as a point of departure to reflect on what is at stake when past, present and future collide – in the recovery of absented pasts, the archiving of a rapidly unfolding present, and anticipatory imaginations of new futures.