unnamed people – Misryoum explores how colonial-era Kerala photography turns individuals into “types,” and what ethical looking demands from today’s viewers and archives.
Kerala’s colonial photography archives are full of faces—yet too many return without names.
The camera captures stillness. labour. and everyday presence across British-era Kerala. but the archival record often refuses the simplest form of recognition: a person’s identity.. This is where a keyphrase like “unnamed people” stops being an academic concern and becomes an ethical one—because what we do (or don’t) label shapes what history remembers.
Misryoum sees this tension most clearly when comparing two photographic streams that have come down to us through collections associated with Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf and Alen Campbell McKay.. Their images. made in the early twentieth century. look like documents—work in the fields. people walking to markets. women facing the lens.. But behind each frame sits a deeper question: when someone is pictured. yet left unrecorded. what exactly are we being asked to know?
One pattern repeats.. Some photographs preserve people as bodies in motion—carrying, harvesting, crossing landscapes—yet flatten their individuality into occupational categories.. A man with a load becomes inseparable from the object he carries; a caption turns “earthen pots” into a stand-in for the people moving alongside them.. The visual grammar is rhythmic and legible. but the archive withholds the particulars that would make a life readable as a life.. Misryoum cannot treat this as mere incompleteness.. It reads instead as a practice of selective recognition: labour is visible, yet personhood is not.
In other images, the shift is sharper.. Where one collection may capture activity first, another leans into classification.. Captions attached to people can become taxonomies—caste names. community identifiers. functional titles—so that the archive presents not only what was seen. but how it should be sorted.. The effect is not just descriptive; it becomes structural.. When a person becomes a “Cheruman woman harvesting paddy” or a “Paniyar man” using a woven rain shield. the photograph starts performing the archive’s hierarchy in real time.. Misryoum’s editorial lens here is simple: once caste becomes the primary axis of identification. the photograph stops offering a window and begins enforcing a system.
There is also a quieter, more unsettling asymmetry: the unequal visibility of individuals.. In McKay’s album pages, some people receive names and annotations—bureaucratic roles, personal assessments, hints of status.. Elsewhere, figures appear with no label beyond the fact that they were “seen.” That contrast matters.. It suggests that recognition was not random; it was governed by what the photographer needed the archive to do.. Misryoum reads the missing names as a clue to purpose.. The camera does not just record Kerala; it organizes Kerala for an external gaze that values certain relationships. roles. and narratives more than others.
Women’s confrontations with the lens underline the emotional weight of these omissions.. Expressions that register surprise. discomfort. even resistance sit alongside captions that frame them through colonial judgment—what is “modesty. ” what is “affrighted. ” what is being interpreted rather than understood.. The archive’s words behave like a second camera. steering meaning away from the subject and toward the viewer’s assumptions.. Misryoum’s concern is not only representation. but authority: captions dictate rather than describe. and the person becomes less a participant in the image and more an object for classification.
Yet agency isn’t absent altogether.. McKay’s later album pages. where he groups friends. family. and himself under headings that parody official documentation—“personalities. ” “notabilities”—offer a different emotional register.. Here, identity is curated.. The photographer and his circle stage themselves as belonging: leisure spaces. social titles. performative groupings that mirror colonial forms while turning them into a kind of social passport.. Still, the frame cannot fully exclude the local figures who appear beside them.. A child in the margins is present but not captioned.. Misryoum reads that gap as revealing: the archive’s “choice” of who gets narrative weight is an uneven negotiation. not an accident of focus.
This is why Misryoum insists on the phrase “unnamed people” as more than a theme—it’s a cultural and historical problem that spills into how contemporary audiences consume archives.. When people are preserved as types or backgrounds, the archive quietly trains us to accept distance.. We learn to read the colonized as atmosphere and the colonizer as subject.. That training affects scholarship, museum display choices, and public memory long after the original shutter click.
To look ethically, then, requires more than searching for a name.. It requires slowing down the viewing itself: asking why one person becomes legible while another disappears into a descriptor; noticing where the photograph centers authority and where it withdraws it; and recognizing that an image without annotation can still carry a presence that deserves more than background attention.. Misryoum’s editorial stance is that the question “who were they?” should not end in a definitive answer.. In many cases, the archive cannot provide it.. But the urgency of looking—careful. critical. and human—can restore dignity to what colonial photography once treated as convenient evidence.
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