What did India’s industrial change look like from inside a home? And how does history feel when recorded by an ordinary observor? Sparseeing, a new photobook and exhibition in Delhi, explores these ideas through personal memories, photographs, and everyday life.
Opened on December 4 at Offset Projects in Okhla Phase II, the show centres on the personal archive of Keki Gazder - Chief Electrical Engineer at TELCO (now Tata Motors) and a passionate amateur photographer.
Gazder lived in Jamshedpur in the early years after Independence. His camera captured a town growing quickly — new factories, more chimneys, and planned townships; while also recording the gentle side of life: family dinners, weekend outings, friendships, and festivals.
A twin window
This mix of factory life and family moments is what makes Gazder’s archive special. Old prints, negatives, postcards, diaries, and glass slides show how big industrial dreams grew right beside everyday warmth at home. Change brought excitement, and sometimes disruption, but family routines continued to hold life together.
To bring this archive alive, artists Joyona Medhi and Abhishek Basu — winners of the 2022 Alkazi Photobook Grant, stepped in as storytellers, not just organisers. They call their method “fictive reimagination,” a reminder that archives are never complete. Missing photos, faded memories, and silent gaps become part of the story too, a space where imagination fills what time has erased.
That sense of incompleteness was deeply personal for the family too. As Varun Gazder, the photographer’s grandson, recalls: “The photographs were not in perfect condition when we first found them. Yet, despite the cracks and fading, they carried a warmth, a nostalgia that instantly transported me to my grandfather’s days. I could almost see him on his evening walks, recall the pride he took in helping build the Tata locomotives, and his role in shaping the Tata Club, along with the affection and goodwill he earned from the town's people.”
Varun adds that the collaboration itself had roots in home: “Abhishek and I are from the same town, and it started when he had visited my Parsee café in Jamshedpur. I needed help to restore the glass slides and that’s how we collaborated.”
The images required careful restoration and digitisation. Medhi and Basu played an integral role in bringing them back to life and ensuring they could be part of this book. The entire process took around four years.
Even a small anecdote like Gazder once misplacing the hood of his camera lens abroad and anxiously searching for it until it resurfaces becomes symbolic: archiving is a constant process of losing and recovering. Some traces vanish; others return.
The palimpsest of history
The title Sparseeing reflects that sensibility, seeing with an awareness that things are disappearing. In Jamshedpur’s rush toward industrial modernity, Gazder's camera became a bridge between what was emerging and what quietly receded—a transformation that one saw closer home in Gurugram as highrises and corporate towers took over agricultural land.
The entire archive spans from the late 1800s to the late 1900s. The 1960s-80s are featured prominently, years that capture both the expanding industrial horizon and the intimate rhythms of homelife.
The exhibition turns this idea into experience. The space is set up like a 1950s attic, divided into four sections with around 120 items - original prints from the 1930s-70s, enlargements, documents, and family artefacts.
Visitors can hold negatives up to lightboxes, just as Gazder once did. There are flipbooks - small books of images that create a sense of motion when the pages are flipped - and long accordion-style displays that unfold like a zig-zag to show many photographs at once. These remind us that photographs are not just images, but physical memories meant to be held and explored.
Reading into fragments
Rather than offering fixed captions, the show encourages interpretation. What was he thinking as he framed this moment? The viewer becomes a co-author, piecing together fragments of a life.
The visual journey moves from the clean precision of industrial frames to the gentler spaces of home: children at play, friends visiting, weekends unfolding in sunlight. By the end, the archive feels less like evidence and more like a life unfloding during a time of change.
Supported by the Alkazi Foundation, Offset Projects, and Tata Trusts, Sparseeing brings industrial history back to the people who lived and built it. It shows that India’s progress was not only made in factories, but also in homes that kept those dream standing.
The exhibition runs until January 4, 2026.