Amrita Sher-Gil’s life and work was spent in trying to unsettle the frames imposed by her Indo-European extraction, her aristocratic, high bourgeois milieu, her gender. But her presence was framed in a more literal sense by the photographic lens.

Her father Umrao Singh Sher-Gil was an amateur photographer of exceptional talent whose principal subject was his family – and himself. Pandering to the playful narcissism of anyone who ever toyed with a camera, photography’s ‘genius’ for producing alter egos could also be considered as a device that allows for the assertion of individual agency during periods in history when ‘eccentric’ affirmations of the self lend themselves to be seen as acts of resistance to the prevailing status quo.

Umrao Singh Sher- Gil’s photographic archive, like his daughter’s pictorial oeuvre, is a major instance of modern self-fashioning and the construction of a proto post-colonial subject. The photographs are precious documents of the personae that shaped the complexion of modernity in India.