Imprint Archive is shaped by an interest in the parts of history that sit outside official narratives — the drawings, photographs, studies, and printed objects that formed the visual world of the subcontinent long before the present.

Much of this material was created through a colonial way of seeing, a gaze that observed, categorized, and kept its subjects at a distance. Yet, as Tina Campt suggests, images often carry quieter frequencies beneath their surface, traces that exceed the intentions of those who made them. Paying attention to these subtler details opens a different relationship to the past, one that looks beyond the frame of empire.

The archive gathers these fragments, architectural surveys, early photographs, maps, botanical records, and other forms of ephemera, and brings them back into view. Restored and carefully reproduced in Lahore, they offer an entry point into the layered visual culture of the region.

The aim is not to romanticize history, but to make space for it: to see what endures, what still speaks, and how these images might help locate ourselves within a longer, continuum of place and memory.