This is a curatorial reading programme by Offset Projects that positions the photobook as a critical site of encounter between image, text, and reader. The programme approaches reading as a collective and performative practice, activating the book as a space where narrative, authorship, and visual address are examined.
Presented within Triveni Kala Sangam, this 1.5-hour session brings participants into close engagement with a curated selection of photo books that interrogate photographic sequencing, narrative form, and modes of authorship. The session is led by Anshika Varma, editor and founder of Offset Projects, and opens with a brief contextual presentation that frames bookmaking as a practice of care, attentive to materiality, circulation, and the ethics of representation. It further situates independent publishing practices in South and Southeast Asia as vital to visual literacy, cultural memory, and translocal storytelling.
Moving away from exhibition-led spectatorship, the programme foregrounds slow, collective reading as a curatorial method. Participants are invited to read, observe, and discuss photobooks in a shared setting, with facilitated conversations that move between individual engagement and broader social and political inquiry.
Within this structure, each photobook functions as a discursive prompt, generating reflection on how photographic narratives are constructed, circulated, and received.
Through its participatory format, Collective Reading Session repositions the photobook as a social and pedagogical tool—one that fosters dialogue, collective meaning-making, and sustained engagement with visual narratives.
