research  

A reluctant archive? Time, everyday life, and political imagination at a photographic archive in Dhaka, Bangladesh

[PhD research, ongoing - MPhil/PhD Anthropology (Visual and Material Culture subsection), University College London]
Based on long-term fieldwork at an independent photographic archive in Dhaka, Bangladesh, my doctoral research makes a case for the ethnographic study of archives, not solely as repositories of documents, images, and objects, but as dynamic sites of both knowledge production and everyday life and work. Set against the backdrop of Bangladesh’s polarised political histories, I explore how archival absences themselves contributed to the emergence of new archival forms, and the ensuing contestations over historical narration.

Taking the archive as subject rather than source, I resist the polarisation between the field and the archive, refusing the associated bifurcations between living and dead, or present and past. Instead, I turn to Achille Mbembe’s argument that there cannot be ‘a definition of the archive that does not encompass both the building itself and the documents stored there’ (2002: 19). Following David Zeitlyn’s observation (2012) that the slippage between these poles provides a particularly fruitful space for analysis, I introduce a third layer to this configuration, namely, to take the archive also as the community that sustains it.

I argue that we must play close attention to everyday life and work at the archive, considering how such work looks, feels, sounds, and smells. This vantage point can thus provide a lens through which to understand how archival practitioners both imagine new political futures and work prefiguratively to bring them into being. Methodologically, the archive becomes field site, and its staff, community, and collections form a varied set of interlocutors.

publications

‘A Photograph Unfolds Infinitely - an Interview with Vincent Hasselbach by Zahra Amiruddin’. Arttaca.

Pinney, Christopher, and Vincent Hasselbach. 2023. “Unruliness and Exorbitance: Anthropology, Collaboration and the Photographic Event”. Membrana – Journal of Photography, Theory and Visual Culture 8 (1):57–76.
https://doi.org/10.47659/mj-v8n1id160

conferences, panels, and presentations

22 July 2026
EASA 2026, Anthropology: Possibilities in a Polarised World, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań. [conference paper]

15 June 2026
“Imagining the archive, experiencing the state: ethnographic fieldwork at a photographic archive in Dhaka, Bangladesh.” Centre for the Study of South Asia and the Indian Ocean World Early Career Researcher’s Workshop 2026, University College London.

11 June 2026
“Breaking free from shothik itihash? Visual languages of resistance in, around, and after the July Uprising”. 10th Annual Bangladesh Studies Network Conference, Queen Mary University of London.

14 April 2026
“gonotontro mukti pak” (let democracy be free): continuities and transformations in the visual and material cultures of political resistance in contemporary Bangladesh”. 9th Annual South Asia Conference, Ireland India Institute, Dublin City University.

9 April 2026
UCL x Bow Arts knowledge exchange labs: exploring migration, identities and cultural fluidity. Laisul Hoque and Yang Zou in conversation with Vincent Hasselbach. UCL East Community Cinema, London. [panel chair]. 

13 March 2026
Images from the Uprising. Iftar gathering #3: discussing critical discourses and celebrating the diversity of the Bangladeshi diaspora with OITIJ-JO Collective, Nunnery Gallery, London.  

19 January 2026
“Building books, building worlds: a conversation on photobook practices. Anshika Varma, Nicolas Polli, and Shahria Sharmin, in conversation with Vincent Hasselbach. Chobi Mela XI Festival of Photography, Joyeeta Foundation, Dhaka. [panel chair]

2 September 2025
“A reluctant archive: reflections on archival fieldwork in Dhaka, Bangladesh”. 28th European Conference on South Asian Studies, Universität Heidelberg.

7 July 2025
“awaaz utha, kotha ko! Potential histories and anticipated futures in the visual and material cultures of Bangladesh’s monsoon revolution”. Repurposing Photographic Materials: Transforming Social, Political, and Cultural Heritage, De Montfort University, Leicester.

teaching

2024-2025
ANTH0074: Art in the Public Sphere, UCL Anthropology. Postgraduate Teaching Assistant (PGTA). 

Anthropology and Photography: thinking through theory and practice. Guest seminar series at Pathshala South Asian Media Institute, Dhaka, BD.