Reading the censored letters of soldiers from the Indian sub-continent writing home in the First World War becomes a way to make a picture of the world. In this work, a selection of their letters also become a way to picture the photographic image. The English translations of the letters have been extracted from ‘Indian Voices of the Great War’, David Omissi, Palgrave, 1999.

Raqs first encountered these letters in 1993 in the India Office Library, London, and brought them into ‘The Surface of Each Day is a Different Planet’ (2009), an open-ended video work examining how collectivity and anonymity have been represented over time. In ‘Seen at Secunderabagh’ (with Zuleikha Chaudhari, 2011), the letters outlined passage of time and a historical subjectivity that alters the way we encounter photographs.