Submission
guidelines

Photographs — what we're looking for

• The poster is the point. Send photos where a poster, placard, banner, graffiti, or creative act of protest is clearly the subject.
• Tell us which protest. The form asks, and it is not a formality — a movement is a cause, not a month. Ken-Betwa is about a river and the people a reservoir would move; the NEET-UG protests were about an examination. They get separate albums, and your photograph goes into the one you name. If yours is not on the list, say so and we will add it rather than file you under the wrong movement. The movements we hold.
• Meaningful moments. A photo should say something on its own — wit, anger, grief, celebration. General crowd shots without a focal point usually don't make the cut.
• Original photos. Photos you took, or that were shared with you with permission to pass on. No screenshots of Instagram posts, news graphics, or images with app interfaces burned in.

Photographs — about faces, read this

• Avoid identifiable faces where you can. Shoot the placard, not the person. Ask people to hold signs in front of their faces — many already do.
• We automatically cover faces. Every photo we publish goes through a review where recognisable faces of people in the crowd get a tape sticker placed over them. This protects protesters from being identified. Faces printed on posters — politicians, memes, cartoons — stay visible; they are the art.
• No personal data. Crop out phone numbers, number plates, ID cards, and names of private individuals before uploading.

Photographs — children

Young people were the centre of these protests, and photographs of them belong in this archive. We publish a photograph containing someone who is visibly a child only where they are taking part — carrying a placard, marching, painting a wall — and never as an incidental face in a crowd. Their faces are covered like everyone else's, and we will not name them. If you are a parent or guardian and want a photograph of your child removed, ask, and we will take it down without argument or delay.

Photographs — the practical bits

• You can upload ten photos at a time — JPG, PNG, WebP or HEIC. Your browser shrinks them before they are sent, so a batch straight off a phone is fine.
• We delete your email address 30 days after a curator decides, along with the files you uploaded. What we keep, and for how long, is written out on What we keep.
• Every submission is reviewed by the curators before publishing. We may resize, crop, or cover faces. Duplicates and screenshots are quietly dropped.
• Tell us how you'd like to be credited — "Anonymous" is completely fine.
• Strong language on placards is fine; that's the street speaking. Obscene imagery, nudity, or content unrelated to the movement is not published.

Essays — writing for the Lighthouse

The Lighthouse is where the archive stops being a wall of pictures and starts being an account of what happened. Most of it was written in-house; Album 011, on the graffiti that went up around Jantar Mantar and was painted over within a day, came from a reader. We would like more of it to.

• Write from the archive. An essay here is anchored to photographs that are already published — name the ones you are writing about by their number or link, and tell us if the one you need is missing. If you have the photographs and they are not in the archive yet, upload them first.
• 800 to 1,600 words. Long enough to say something, short enough to be read on a phone on a train. The published essays run about that length; Twenty-Six Days is a fair example of the shape.
• Dates, names, numbers. If you write that a paper leaked, say when, how many candidates sat it, and who said so. Anything we cannot check against a public record, we will ask you about before publishing.
• Your own voice, and your own writing. First-hand accounts are especially welcome — you were at the march, you made the placard, you sat the exam. We do not publish text generated by a chatbot.
• Plain, and unhurried. No press-release adjectives, no rousing finish that tells the reader what to feel. The photographs are already loud. The writing does not have to be.

• What we will not run: party campaign material, attacks on named private individuals, calls for anyone to be harmed, or anything passing off someone else's work as yours.
• Editing. A curator reads every essay. We may come back with questions, ask for cuts, or check a fact with you. Nothing is published under your name that you have not seen in its final form.
• Credit and rights. You keep your copyright. You are credited however you ask, including anonymously — say so on the form and we will not print your name anywhere.
• Time. Expect a first reply within about a week. If we go quiet longer than that, write to us again; it means something has gone wrong at our end, not yours.

Send us an essay

Want a photo taken down?

If you appear in a photo, made a poster shown here, or hold rights to an image and want it removed or credited differently — use the takedown form. No questions, quick turnaround.