Invisible Journey

Abstract

This essay considers a set of photographs taken in early 1947 in Lahore and in Punjab when the region was still united in India. The images traveled from India to Australia in 1948, and a single image journeyed to the world's first Partition Museum in Amritsar in 2017. They represent a moment of tangled relations between object, history, migration, and technology. The photographer was young and, like his subjects, was unaware of the horror that would erupt outside the frame a few months after the photographs were taken. The British government placed great burdens on the shoulders of young men, as hinted at in the images. Seventy-five years later, viewers are privy to that knowledge, which lends a layer of pathos to the images. This essay draws on oral history and family photographs to explore a time, experience, and place just before one of the great tragic migrations of twentieth-century history.