Unreadability in South Asian Photography

In today's episode, I'm reading an essay by Eleanor Sanghara Güstard, published in Shade Art Review today. Eleanor inherited an old Nikon F50 from her late father. When the lens cracked, she kept shooting through it. Those "poor images" became a methodology for navigating her position between Britain and India, whiteness and brownness. In her essay, Eleanor traces a lineage of South Asian photographers who use technical strategies, from blur and opacity to degradation, to work against the colonial demand for clarity. From Umrao Singh Sher-Gil's pioneering work from the 1890s through the mid-20th century to Sutapa Biswas and Al-An deSouza's contemporary practice, she shows us how unreadability becomes a site of autonomy. Shade Art Review @shade_podcast @eleanor.sanghara Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You can listen to Unreadability in South Asian Photography online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Unreadability in South Asian Photography is an episode from Shade by Lou Mensah.

This episode is 12:30 long.

This episode was published on Jan 24, 2026.

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