Photo Essays
Albums from the archive, newest first. Album 001 is at the bottom.
The Lighthouse is open to writers. Album 011 came from a reader. It was the first that did, and the reason we asked. We would like it not to be the last, especially from people who were actually there. 800 to 1,600 words, written from the photographs. What we're looking for · Send us an essay
In a gold frame
On the march to the Supreme Court, the most carefully made object in the crowd was carrying a slogan borrowed from a protest the police had stopped two days before.
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The tyranny that wounds my heart
A Dutch square, a row of Indian placards printed off the internet, and four stone pillars behind them that were already about this.
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The king's life is in the parrot
A day of door-to-door campaigning in Pune, where the printed banners carry the organisation's name and the hand-painted ones carry the argument.
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A placard made of placards
In Ranchi one protester carried the whole protest on a single sheet of A4, and four of the five photographs here carry a printed image glued to something handmade.
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Written on the road
Everything else in this archive was made to be held up. The chalk was made to be stood on, and to be gone by the end of the week.
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My Gamla, My Phool
Ten photographs from a night in Goa, where the placards argue about the body as something owned and enjoyed as well as something to be kept safe.
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Two kinds of paper
An organisation prints two hundred identical placards. One person writes a sentence about bangles. Both were lying on the same stretch of road.
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Dilwalon, struck out
The placards do not describe the city. They cross out what the city already says about itself and write the correction underneath.
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Six o'clock
Two cities reach for the same hour without having seen each other, and a night march photographs itself by neon.
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Dear System, Dear Mother, Dear Draupadi
Sort the placards by who they are talking to, and one march comes apart into four arguments happening in the same road.
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Faster Than Your Answer
A printed union banner and a student's cardboard, tied to the same piece of string, and a complaint measured in delivery times.
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In their own typeface
A large part of this archive was not lettered by hand. It was printed at a shop, in somebody else's layout, with the words swapped.
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Leaks That Are Natural and Beautiful
The summer's word was leak. Three placards answered it with the one leak Indian public life will not name.
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Missing, one spine
Three placards about a bone: a lost-property notice, a fashion note, and a promise made to somebody's mother.
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Frands
Three cities printed the same photograph under the same word. Then two months of placards addressed to somebody who did not reply.
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Who they brought with them
Savitribai Phule, Ambedkar, Bhagat Singh and a printed copy of the Constitution, held above a crowd that had come about a question paper.
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Mitaoge To Kal Phir Aayenge
Within a day of the protests being called off, the walls around Jantar Mantar were painted over. One message had already been sprayed across an earlier erasure.
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Ka Cut Gaya
Three scripts, four languages, and a pun that only works if you can read two of them at once. What the protest chose to write in.
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Ek Baap Ka Hoga Toh
A minister in a pink hair bow, a packet of nappies, and a placard about daddy issues. What the students were really accusing the state of.
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Know Your Parasites
What the placards were actually written in: the exam form, the group chat, and one insult that got taken and kept.
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Twenty-Six Days
A pavement outside Parliament, a party named after an insult, and a hunger strike that outlasted the minister it was aimed at.
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Five thousand at Shivaji Park
24 July 2026: Mumbai's turn, with the tricolour, the national anthem, and a drawing nobody was meant to forget.
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Day eight at Freedom Park
Bengaluru got the resignation it had been asking for, spent an afternoon celebrating, and then asked for considerably more.
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Sealdah to Esplanade
24 July 2026: Kolkata marches against the paper leak carrying memes, and the police meet the crowd at Dorina Crossing. The minister resigned the next day.
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We won the resignation
The education minister resigned, and the streets that demanded it turned, for one evening, into a festival, told through the archive's photographs.
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Rain at Jantar Mantar
On 20 July 2026, students from across India gathered in the Delhi monsoon before marching on Parliament. Photographs by Sumita Roy Dutta.
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The streets speak, and wit bears witness
Hand-lettered cardboard, borrowed cartoons, and one-line jokes sharp enough to cut through a news cycle. This is how ordinary people design their dissent.
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