Family Photos: Notes on Zinnia Naqvi’s ‘Dear Nani’ and ‘Yours to Discover’

Family photo albums have an unusual way of finding their way into unexpected public spaces: galleries, libraries, garage sales, auctions. When untethered from private custody, albums seem to lose some of their personal attachments, becoming instead something to be collected and viewed, handled and looked at by strangers. We see this in Victorian-era album displays in museums or in various artist projects, like Max Dean: Album, in which Toronto-based artist Max Dean showcased his collection of over 400 albums in an attempt to repatriate them to new or original owners. Albums shift within these contexts from living documents to detached artifacts and objects. But some albums take another route altogether, remaining simultaneously private and public. 

Zinnia Naqvi’s Dear Nani (2017) and Yours to Discover (2019) offer intimate and challenging instances of how the family album can remain firmly planted in the realm of the personal while taking up meaningful space in public. Turning to her own family albums, Naqvi’s works comb through layered narratives that engage with themes of authenticity, cultural translation, language, and gender. Her practice combines photography, video, writing, archival footage, and installation as a means to foreground weighty subjects ranging from migration and memory to colonialism. She further addresses ideas pertaining to identity construction and the ways in which photography in particular can be a useful device in generating counter viewpoints to historical and contemporary notions of place, nation, and self. Although Naqvi does not show the album as such—as a bound collection of snapshots—she does in a sense turn it inside out, dispersing its contents with care and thoughtful intention.

Dear Nani (2017) centers around photographs of Naqvi’s maternal grandmother, Rhubab Tapal. The images were taken in 1948 by Rhubab’s husband, Gulam Abbas Tapal, while the two were on their honeymoon in Quetta and Karachi, Pakistan. In each image Rhubab faces the camera smiling, seemingly happy, playful, and at ease. Rhubab’s contented demeanor immediately establishes a way into the images. Her friendly and comfortable appearance suggests that she is happy to be photographed and to have these moments documented and shared. The same can be said of her chosen attire. The photographs show Rhubab dressed in her husband’s suits, tunics, ties, and hats, in what at the time would have been considered almost exclusively “men’s clothing.” The clothes are a little too big on Rhubab, subtly suggesting they may not be hers.  

Interspersed within the black and white photographs of Rhubab are colour images of the artist responding to her family archive. In one image, a photo of Rhubab standing in a backyard and dressed in a suit floats atop a larger image of a lushly green garden with the artist sitting in the background, out of focus. The texture of the photograph of Rhubab—the slight discolouration, frayed edges, and minor folds—contrasts effectively with the newness of the artist’s more recent medium-format self-portrait, highlighting the time lapse between the two images. In another particularly captivating work, a grainy photograph of a lone dangling leg is overlaid with an image of Naqvi sitting in a wooden chair with her legs similarly positioned. Faces and full figures are absent in both images, though we do see glimpses of the artist: her green nail polish, her white tank top. There is a likeness, vulnerability, and tenderness to the pairing. This tenderness extends in the project’s textual element in which Naqvi carries out a fictional conversation with her Nani. Through this brief back and forth, she is able to collapse inter-generational distance, working to better understand these images. One part of the exchange, for example, proceeds as follows:  

It looks like a proper photo shoot. All the pictures are very posed with props and different outfits.

Well his clothes felt like costumes to me so it started to feel like a movie set. I started to pose with props like the heroes or villains in films. We came up with different scenes based on the outfits. Each had a very different look.

Placing herself in the images and in dialogue with her grandmother creates a space to attempt to ascribe her own political reading to the work.​​¹ Naqvi explains that the project is not just about attempting to parse out meaning lost to time. The family does not know much about the photos and why Rhubab is dressed as she is. The images were not a secret but were not explained either.² Is Rhubab challenging gender norms and expectations? Is she intending her portraits to carry a political charge? Was this simply dress-up? Naqvi is not sure, but the project articulates to the viewer that there are multiple personal and political meanings folded into the images. 

Several different performances are discernible within Dear Nani. Naqvi performs a close reading of the images and re-enacting her grandmother’s gender performance. We have less knowledge of Rhubab’s intentions: is the performance the cross-dressing, or outside of it? Is it neither, something in-between or both simultaneously? Rhubab is also performing, as Naqvi notes, “colonial mimicry.” When writing about the project, Naqvi quotes Homi K. Bhabha who states in his essay Of Mimicry and Man that “colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite.” She explains that in one image Nani holds a Children’s Encyclopaedia, produced as an edifying tool for subjects of the British colonies, and in so doing “she is performing not only the role of man, but also an Indian man performing the role of a British man.” Perhaps Naqvi’s grandfather, who took the picturesand whose clothes she is wearing, is similarly performing gender and race roles by helping to stage these images and their complex depictions. We may be left to speculate on the encyclopedia’s meaning, but given that these images were taken in Pakistan in 1948, the year after the nation achieved independence from the British Raj, it seems unlikely that this object is merely a prop.  

Photography has historically been practiced at establishing and re-entrenching violent separations by documenting and visualizing binaries of man/woman, ruler/subject and colonizer/colonized, to name but a few. The performative gestures in Dear Nani seem to complicate these binaries by foregrounding contradictions, ambiguities, and uncertainties. Naqvi’s use of intertextuality and double meanings invokes a kind of productive confusion whereby images can be seen through a de-stabilized and de-naturalized lens. Images are always read through the positionality of the viewer, even though so much photography claims otherwise. Dear Nani in particular leaves plenty of room to try to read the images by way of our own individual mediations and questions. In this way Naqvi asks the medium itself to function differently and more openly, asking that it retain some of the emotional residue and unexplainable qualities of the personal archive and family album. 

Found photos also appear in Naqvi’s most recent three-image project, Yours to Discover (2019). The project is still in progress, and Naqvi plans to add more images to the work, which focuses on a family trip taken to Canada in 1988. Naqvi describes the images as part of a kind of reconnaissance mission in which her family visited several iconic Ontario sites, including the CN Tower, Niagara Falls, and Cullen Gardens, in order to consider the prospect of immigrating to Canada from Karachi, Pakistan. The project is titled after Ontario’s licence plate slogan, which was adopted in 1982 but has since been amended by Doug Ford’s Conservative government to Open For Business. Resembling still lifes, the works combine family snapshots with board games, VHS tapes of Disney movies, books, and other objects. The props and primary colour palette speak to the era in which the family photos were taken. On first glance the images have a distinctly nostalgic 80s look. Upon closer inspection, however, the performance of nationalism, capitalism, and citizenship and the relationship between them informs the visual traces Naqvi leaves for us to unpack. 

In Keep Off the Grass – Cullen Gardens and Miniature Village, 1988, an image of Naqvi’s family gathered around model suburban homes is presented alongside a Monopoly board and stacks of rainbow-coloured paper money. On the face of things, Cullen Gardens​​³ and Monopoly are amusing takes on North American modes of living. On a much deeper level, however, these images present cultural expectations that assume Canadians will subscribe to property ownership, wealth accumulation and a devotion to capital. Similarly, The Wanderers – Niagara Falls, 1988 combines the board game Settlers of Catan with a VHS of Pocahontas, a copy of the book Cultivating Canada and photos of the artist’s family visiting Niagara Falls. The colonial references to forced displacement, land grabs and Canadian history as settler history are made apparent through Naqvi’s careful selection and arrangement of objects. During the period in which Naqvi’s family made their trip and documented their travels, Canada would have been heavily invested in multiculturalist rhetoric. Yours to Discover decodes Canadian mythmaking of togetherness and pluralism. Instead, I see a counterview that accounts for Canada’s ongoing denial of Indigenous sovereignty, full equality, and alternative economic systems committed to sharing and reciprocity. By bringing together many different visual elements, Naqvi appears to be pointing to, on the one hand, nationalist fantasies enacted through grand landscapes and architecture, and on the other, the granularities and realities of daily life. The sites that Naqvi’s family visits are heavily invested in rendering a specific value and power system that maintains certain ways of being Canadian while excluding others. As with Dear Nani, we are encouraged to conduct our own analyses of the works and consider to what extent Naqvi’s family is performing Canadianess in these images. What instances of refusal might be quietly revealed here? And how is each family member negotiating their own national identities on and off camera?  

A question I keep returning to with this work, one that I have posed directly to Naqvi, is: does showing personal snapshots within a gallery context alter the images by turning them into artworks, or does bringing the family archive into the gallery shift the space itself, changing how it operates and for whom? What changes—the images or the space? Ultimately, this is a question that is concerned with how images circulate and the impacts they have once they leave the privacy of the family archive and take up residency in public space. After spending time in the company of Naqvi’s works, I am convinced that the images remain personal and act on the gallery to shift the kind of narratives and subjectivities that are foregrounded within institutional spaces. Dear Nani and Yours to Discover bring self-selective and self-representative archives rooted in family, relationships, questions, and uncertainties into public view. Maybe we can say, then, that Naqvi’s practice allows the family album to, in a sense, stay within the family even while being shared far beyond it, and that this sharing helps bend the gallery into a more generous and vulnerable space.      

Noa Bronstein is a writer and curator based in Toronto. 

1. Phone call with artist, August 9, 2019.
2. Phone call with artist.
3. Cullen Gardens and Miniature Village in Whitby, Ontario was a popular tourist site of 160 miniature buildings, cottages and homes. The site was operational from 1980 through 2006.

This article is published in issue 37.1 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue