The Mayank Austen Soofi Archive Project

Building the complete online collection of writings and photographs.

Over a decade or more, I have been reporting and documenting everyday life in Delhi through writing and photography. By now, I have accumulated thousands of photographs and stories of the changing city and its people. Ten or twenty or fifty years later, if somebody wants to know what life in Delhi was like, they can simply turn to this work.

The loss and the archive
Accidentally losing 30,000 pictures, taken during the course of 2018, made me realize the vulnerabilities of working in a digital world. My entire oeuvre that aims to capture the shifting time in a great city can get abruptly lost one day. So, I’m now turning this work into a project focused at collecting and archiving it, making it accessible to the public as a single body of work. The project has been conceived together with Venice-based Anna Gerotto, who is curating it. The Mayank Austen Soofi Archive will comprise a digital corpus of more than 200,000 photographs and thousands of pages of text, constantly updated and enriched with my ongoing work.

Support the Project
To make this possible, it needs your financial support, dear reader. You could support the archive from India and abroad by making a donation starting from Rs 500 (if you are a student). As a token of my gratitude, I shall send you a very personal gift.

The Somewhere in Delhi Postcard Collection
Many years ago, the photo studio of H.A. Mirza & Sons produced a series of beautiful postcards, showing Delhi’s great monuments and landmarks. The cards were photographed in Delhi and printed in Germany. This firm is now history.

Today, another series of 5 limited edition postcards on contemporary Delhi, based on my work, has been produced. They are printed in Venice, Italy, on behalf of The Mayank Austen Soofi Archive Project.

The Special Gift
To any supporter making a donation to help bring my archive to life, I will send a personally-inscribed numbered autographed postcard from this collection.

Thank you.
Mayank