Mr. Ajay Salunkhe is a doctoral student in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati. His doctoral research is located in the intertwined histories of photography, archaeology, and museum movement. His doctoral dissertation titled, Framing the Nation: How Museums Tell Stories of India Through Photographs, enquires into the shifting and layered relationship between museums and photographs in post-independent India. He is interested in the potential of photographs to communicate ideas and establish power relations by telling (or not telling) the story of India through her museums, as well as the dynamics of the interactions between visitors and photographs in museum space.
As a Fulbright-Nehru fellow, his research aims to probe the institutional use of photography in the museum and curatorial practices, both in India and abroad, that contributed to the post-colonial Indian imagination, with special reference to the use of photographs in the Festival of India in the US (1985-1986).
He has several years of curatorial, exhibiting, and education experience as part of a museum’s outreach program, which has lent depth and dialogue to his research. He can be found taking long walks at any hour of the day, catching Pokémon, when he is not reading.