I first encountered Alina Tiphagne in New Delhi, our paths crossing through the photographer Jaisingh Nageswaran. Our conversations about art unfolded in fragments—during auto rides through congested streets, over evening chai and snacks, over a rushed early morning breakfast and through late-night phone calls while editing text for exhibitions. In these moments, I discovered Alina’s profound relationship with photography: her ability to elevate the ordinary, shine light on the static familiar, and honour the everyday with rare sensitivity.
Our discussions inevitably circled to identity—what it means to navigate queerness within family structures, within ourselves, and within the violence of a society that often refuses recognition. In these exchanges, I realized we were excavating not just relationships but language itself—searching for frameworks that could hold the weight of our experiences.
Before I knew Alina the artist, I knew of her through a completely different world. Her father, Henri Tiphagne, stands as one of India’s most formidable human rights defenders. To talk about family with someone like Alina, whose world I knew, whose parents knew my parents — it felt like a homemade dessert and a painful bloody accident. It was a reading of each other through silences and laughter, words and sentences that leapt from one topic to another. Alina emerges from this legacy of activism to create work at the intersection of art, human rights, and queer identity—a convergence I had long hoped to showcase. When Guernica offered me this guest editing opportunity, I knew immediately that Alina’s voice was essential.
In “Memory Fragments,” Alina Tiphagne constructs a remarkable meditation on identity, memory, and visibility through absence. The essay itself becomes a form of resistance—containing no photographs while being entirely about them. This deliberate choice transforms readers into active participants, each conjuring unique images from Alina’s evocative descriptions.
She establishes the central metaphor of identity as careful collection, assembled “drop by drop from the atmosphere of memory, experience, and desire.” Through personal anecdotes about first cameras and family archives, alongside reflections on artists like Derek Jarman and Sohrab Hura, she explores how queerness exists in spaces both hyper-visible and utterly erased.
The essay moves across intimate revelations and political awareness, between childhood memories and theoretical frameworks, creating what Alina herself calls a “counter-archive” that resists singularity. In a world where visibility can be both liberation and danger, her essay offers a profound thesis: that identity, like memory itself, is “inherently queer—it resists singularity, always fluid, always fractured.” –Meena Kandasamy
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to thirst
In the vast emptiness of the Namib Desert, a small black beetle waits every morning for a cold Atlantic fog. Perched at the dune’s crest, it contorts itself into an improbable headstand, hind legs stretched skyward, patient for droplets to condense and drip from its bumpy shell into its mouth. In this place—one of Earth’s oldest deserts, receiving less than half an inch of rain annually—this is survival and the beetle knows no other way.
Gathered drop by drop from the atmosphere of memory, experience, and desire, identity emerges through continuous acts of assembly—shifting, knotting, negotiating endlessly with form and time.
My mother kept photographs of the family in a small cupboard in the living room. There was little to no organization—one memory tossed in after the other, a historical, social and intimate, nonsensical mix. As a child, I sat by the cupboard, examining the pictures, obsessively sifting through them and constructing narratives about strangers and distant relatives I didn’t recognize.
I wasn’t searching for specific answers then; rather, it was an obsessive quest—somehow believing that defining who I was, where I came from, might validate my existence. Between these archival images, texts, family histories, and myths, I tried locating myself. There is an inherent necessity to reimagine, to build counter-archives that hold space for multiplicity. Memory is inherently queer—by which I mean it has the desire to resist singularity to remain open—marvel, grieve and be inexorable.
Like great art and writing, text as image and image sequences allows multiple possibilities. Drawing from Roland Barthes’ concept of the Death of the Author, the photographer, in a sense, becomes irrelevant: authorship dissolves, leaving interpretation open-ended and collaborative. This intentional absence of images invites readers into a collective act of composition, measuring, myth-making, and (re) assembly.
to gather
For much of human history, gathering, rummaging, foraging, and scavenging have sustained life, quietly underpinning human survival. While the act of gathering has been overshadowed by conquest, it continues to remain foundational.
Gathering resonates profoundly with queerness: assembling identities deliberately from the marginal and the obscure. Much like the beetle extracting water from invisibility, queer identity carefully collects itself into community—through this photo essay, we will gather vignettes from the photographer’s life.
to remember
I shot my first roll of film when I was in Class 6 on a store-bought plastic camera. A senior I liked had asked if I would photograph her best friend’s birthday party. I agreed, not knowing how to use a film camera or load and shoot film. There was no one to teach me and the internet didn’t exist—at least not for us, in the South Indian town of Madurai in the early 2000s. We were still learning how to make a small triangle move upwards and sideways in computer class, and I only paid attention because I had a massive crush on the teacher. But I digress.
The photo gig went well until it didn’t. With the roll almost done, the camera jammed. I stepped outside, panicked and anxious, and in a rash attempt to save the roll of film from being physically damaged by the mechanics inside the camera, opened the back, exposing the negative to light.
Every frame was ruined—except for a few, though I wouldn’t know that until later. When I told the senior, she stayed silent for a moment, inspecting the camera. Then, sensing how nervous and embarrassed I was, she asked, What were the images like? In retrospect, I think she meant were they good or bad—and whether they were worth missing—but I took the opportunity to describe them to her, image by image, in intricate detail. When I finished, she smiled, leaned forward, and kissed me.
There you go, these images are great. Thank you.
“A close-up of a vanilla cake with the words ‘Happy Birthday Dear Rupa. We love you’ in red fruit jam. Three hands, resting on the table beside the cake — one with a pink plastic knife with ‘NMP Bakery’ printed in white. A hand reaching to shield the candle from going out
before the birthday girl has had her chance to make a wish.”
…
It seems inevitable now that photography and text would intertwine in my practice, and when I look back on my relationship with the medium over the last two decades, I recognize that much of it began with making or being asked to make family pictures during vacations and special occasions, and while sending the annual Season’s Greetings to friends and family. While all of these continue and the annual greeting finds new formats, moving from screen-printed postcards to WhatsApp groups, the function of the photograph has remained the same–to mark an occasion, to capture memories and to share them with friends and family. But what if it was more?
to loiter
Speaking with American photographer Eugene Richards one evening, he told me that he was the most influenced by films, and that in his photographs he was capturing frames of a specific moment in time–wanting to know where the moment would go next. At his 2018 show, The Run-On of Time, a vitrine in the central hall contains ephemera belonging to his partner, Dorothea Lynch. Dorothea was thirty-four when she discovered that she had breast cancer; and in an attempt to share her experience with others, she kept a diary, and asked Richards to document her struggle. The diary lay in the vitrine and was opened to a page where Dorothea wrote about what it means to accept one’s death and quotes from Pather Panchali – one of The Apu Trilogy films, directed by the legendary Bengali filmmaker Satyajit Ray. The film follows Apu’s idyllic life with his sister Durga and their aunt Indir Thakrun. Indir’s death under a tree marks Apu’s very first encounter with the concept of death.
It is this same sensibility that one sees in the photo essay “Out of Mind, Out of Sight — Inside the psychiatric hospitals the world forgot.” Speaking of the assignment, Richards always mentioned how important it was for the photographer to resist prescribed routes and stray from guided paths to uncover truths:
“Hidalgo, Mexico, 1999. Though the sun is beginning to filter in through the barred windows, it’s damp and cold in the men’s ward at Fernando Ocaranza Psychiatric Hospital—no more than fifty degrees. Around the edges of the common room are tangled nests of men lying together in heaps, trying to stay warm. Others shuffle busily back and forth, as if they have a destination in mind. In the middle of the floor, running half the length of the ward, is a pool of urine.”
Men’s ward, Ocaranza Psychiatric Institute, Hidalgo, Mexico 1999. Photograph by Eugene Richards
For a young journalist preoccupied with the “truth” and its evidentiary nature, this became the means to accessing an idea worth exploring. Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993) confronts this dilemma of looking. The film is nothing but a field of Yves Klein blue, accompanied by an aching monologue of illness, loss, and mortality. By stripping away the image, Jarman forces us to reckon with feeling—what is left when visibility is denied? What does it mean to have a body that exists outside the frame? This is my question to you, Reader.
I stepped away from traditional photojournalism towards art, seeking freedom in crafting narratives rather than simply relaying them. I resigned as a copy desk editor from a news channel in Delhi and went home to Madurai, where I spent time building my body of work. I was until then a self-taught photographer, and hadn’t done any major work except for non-profit human rights organizations. Since both my parents were activists, I was tasked with making pictures and documenting their work whenever I was visiting them, but I really wanted to stray in a different direction. I enrolled to study photography, formally for the first time, at the International Centre of Photography in New York. All the photographers whose work I was looking at and learning from had gone to ICP. It wasn’t easy–for a photography school, ICP spends very little time teaching students how to make photographs, focusing more on showing them how to see and look at the world they live in. For my final project there, I photographed “absence” in homes that were witnessing detentions and deportations by the U.S Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency. I returned to India at the end of 2019 and three months later the world went into lockdown. I had just gotten a job with Khoj International Artists’ Association, and through it, found an “in” into the arts. This marked a significant shift in my work, merging artistic practice and social inquiry. Khoj was working on a pan-India project that supported artistic interventions on the ground, working with communities to better understand gender-based violence and urbanization. My colleague and I travelled to a few of the sites before the lockdown and documented these artist-led initiatives. Speaking to the artists, and interacting with their work and the communities they worked with, threw up several ideas on building one’s own community.
While the world was suspended and we were holed up at home worried, bored, grieving, adjusting, learning to cook, clean, garden, bake, and take walks on our terrace, our communities became the other terrace-walkers, gardeners, kite-flyers, dog-walkers, readers, artists, laundry-doers. And no one skipped a day.
from memory what memory does not know
In India, where identity is both celebrated and legislated, rights granted and revoked, queerness oscillates between hyper-visibility and erasure, making the personal inseparable from the collective. My ongoing, long-term image-text project, The Liturgy of the Lost Bird, arises from this in-between space through acts of reconstruction–making visible and reconciling with the gaps in memory. It began with Nana’s Clothes, my mother Cynthia’s quiet ritual of wearing her late mother’s garments, embodying grief and inheritance. Soon, I realized the project required a broader format—one capable of holding the complexities of found family, queer desire, myth, and fiction.
Speaking with my teacher Jean Marie Casbarian—who at that time was also working on tracing the seafaring voyage her father took through the North Sea to Scotland in 1943—I recognized that there were similarities to these stories of familial history that we wanted to explore. We planned to build on this and conjure up a mid-journey meeting between my paternal grandmother, Yvette Tiphagne, and Jean’s father. My grandmother—whose photo archives have become an integral part of my practice and long-term project on family—reflects on migration, displacement, war. In the early 40s my grandmother journeyed from Normandy to India. A trained gynecologist, she helped deliver babies at a small rural health center in Arisipalayam in Salem—where she adopted six children including my father—and lived for the larger part of her sixty years in India. The archival project retraces her journey to India, mapping symbolic inheritances and absences.
to love beyond the State
Hervé Guibert, in Ghost Image, proposes that text arises among other reasons because the photographer fails to capture a “perfect” moment. For queer lives, marginalized histories, and unseen experiences, even the “perfect” images do not guarantee legibility. What does it mean to exist unseen? What truths can an image hold when visibility itself remains elusive?
When Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared in 2007, “We don’t have homosexuals in Iran,” Laurence Rasti’s photographs in There Are No Homosexuals in Iran quietly defied this erasure. Her portraits of queer Iranian refugees, identities simultaneously revealed and hidden—faces averted, bodies half-lit—underscore the precarity of visibility. Images do not ensure safety; sometimes, they highlight vulnerability.
“Two men stand close together, their faces touching, one man’s hand around the other’s waist and the other man’s hand on the other’s shoulders. Their clothes are casual, a checked and plain shirt with striped collars and sleeve hems and loose, baggy pants, great and blue. The men are hidden and obscured by balloons—blue, peach orange, white and yellow balloons.”
Beyond queerness, what about images of war, tragedy—children lost in Gaza, Ukraine, Aleppo, Manipur? These visuals saturate timelines yet fail to halt suffering. They persist, bearing evidentiary weight yet spurring no meaningful change.
Art in many ways helps navigate these tensions, by allowing what Christina Sharpe calls wake work, a practice of looking, remembering, and reckoning with the absences and erasures within history. Sohrab Hura’s Images are Masks similarly interrogates the instability of images, embracing fragmentation and ambiguity. Hura suggests photographs can obscure as much as reveal that identity itself is masked, hidden beneath layers of memory and imagination.
In The Liturgy of the Lost Bird, the mythological story of a girl with three breasts fills in the gaps in the memory of my found family. The images, on the other hand, are a collection from the family archive and work I’ve made since I started photographing in school. There are images of former lovers, intertwined with images of village fairs, the funeral of a young student activist who died from a gunshot wound while protesting a copper plant, my father at home, his mother at a hospital in Arisipalayam, my niece, aerial images of Madurai, my mother in an aerobics demonstration at the bottom of a pyramid, and a glorious seventeen-foot Burmese Python, in small acts of witnessing.
“She wandered the forest searching and was swallowed by the sea. The salt in the water burned her eyes and left a thousand cuts on her forehead and neck. By now she had forgotten how to go back home, and her head floated away so there was no way she could remember now, all that was left was the string that she used to tie herself to the bird to try and fly but the string cut and she plunged into the ocean swallowed in silence. Her Body, Her Eucharist.”
to map
There were over three hundred images and forty vinyl records—not to forget the Le Grande Chancellerie de la Légion d’honneur award certificate—that I inherited from my grandmother. The handwritten notes behind the photographs helped me piece together a timeline, and to identify her extended family in Normandy through storefronts with signs announcing discounts ahead of the holidays and the war, summer excursions to the beach, and, in my grandmother’s case, to practice aerobics and theater. Since several members of her family were physiotherapists and had their own treatment center, children and young people in the family were roped into thematically performing demonstrations on the positive impacts of physiotherapy. One of my favorite images in the archive is one in which there are:
“Two young girls, one sitting and another standing, the one standing is wearing an oversized black tuxedo, with pinstripe trousers and black shoes, her hair is folded in to resemble a bob with a few flyaways tucked behind the ear. Her hand is placed on the back of the other’s neck and her gaze is fixed. The other girl is seated on a chair, wearing a top hat, high neck white blouse with pleats, and a black skirt that flows all the way to her ankles with a fraction of her black boots showing by the edge of the skirt. Her hands are relaxed and placed into each other on her lap. Her face remains directed straight ahead while her eyes gaze upwards at the girl in the suit with her tongue sticking out. To her right, on the floor is a black leather bag with sturdy black handles. and a table with two chairs behind. A black coat lies on the table.”
Behind the photo is inscribed “ÉLECTRIC-PHOTO 87 Rue de Vaucelles CAEN”—a place around forty-five miles to the north of Normandy.
Albeit that identity is evolving and shifting, how does one map collective identity and memory?
An example for this would be The Family Camera Network (FamCam) — a collaborative project that explores how photography shapes the idea of family, whether biological or chosen. For LGBTQ2+ communities, for those displaced by war or economic shifts, the family album is often a fractured archive marked by loss, separation, and reinvention. What does it mean to preserve a family’s history when the concept of family itself is fluid? FamCam gathers these narratives, charting the ways in which photography both defines and destabilizes belonging.
“A black and white photograph stuck to the top half of an old and weathered black backing. The decorations include several ornamental, display plates on hooks on the wall and on the shelf in the corner of the dining room. There are two tall candle stands on a console table to the right and two flowers in a vase on the table, which is set for two people. It is a predominantly white house with the doors, windows, trimming, all white and punctuated by the brown of the furniture in the dining room and one ottoman in the living room at the far end of the photograph.”
Leaf 24, George Cline and Annette Fields in uniform and Emily’s “house in-the-woods” Maker: John Dudley Williamson (b. 1885 – d. 1980) Medium: Gelatin silver prints, paper, pencil, stickers Geography: Burlington, Ontario, Canada Date: 1916 Dimensions: 25.1 × 17.6 cm (9 7/8 × 6 15/16 in.) Object number: 2018.83.1.24 Credit Line: Gift of Mary F. Williamson;
Courtesy of The Family Camera Network
Ultimately, these images—created, discovered, hidden—are not mere documents but acts of gathering. Like the Namib beetle patiently waiting for invisible moisture to condense, they are quiet affirmations of identity’s fluid, continuous, porous process. Photography becomes a site not only of documentation but of careful witnessing, holding space for multiplicity, rupture, and the quiet insistence that even what remains unseen or forgotten can sustain us.