Glimpses of sepia-tinted monuments of stone, captured on paper always evoke a nostalgic vibe. For curator Dr Sudeshna Guha, photographs are ‘complex, visual artefacts’. The former curatorial manager and research associate of the photographic collections at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge, knows it well. Opening this week at the Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum, in collaboration with DAG, the exhibition Histories in the Making: Photographing Indian Monuments, will present photographs from the DAG archives dating from the early years of 1850s to 1920s, to explore how the technology shaped and documented India’s architectural heritage.

The Great Pagoda, View of the Sacred Tank in the Great Pagoda (Minakshi Sundareshvara Temple, Madurai), Linnaeus Tripe, 1858