The development of photography has always been inextricably linked to the advancement of technology and artistic expression. Each breakthrough—whether the camera obscura, daguerreotypes, silver gelatin, or the digital camera—has not only shaped the way we see the world, but also how it is documented, continually reshaping how we see, remember, and relate. Contemplating the future of image-making, I am struck by the relentless evolution of technology and the ever-shifting boundaries it continues to push and redefine.

Sabrina Tirvengadum’s piece, Family, is one photograph I keep returning to. Her practice is driven by a desire to unearth the lost records of her Mauritian ancestors, a legacy intertwined with the history of indentured labour in British-colonised Mauritius. Between the 1830s to the early 1900s nearly 500,000 people were brought from India to Mauritius to work under coercive conditions on sugar plantations.

Blending archival images, digital painting and imagery generated using an artificial image tool, she meticulously layers, prompts and encodes new visual narratives. Her work complicates archival structures, where representation, erasure, and imagination converge. In Family, she constructs an image that leans into the tropes of an exotic Mauritian landscape: palm trees, textured sand, soft pink light. The family depicted resembles a typical family portrait: the slightly bored expressions of the children, the various glances in different directions. Yet on closer inspection, anomalies appear—hands with too many fingers, slightly blurred facial features— like subtle signs of both the incompleteness of the technology and the manual labour involved in reimagining lost histories.

SABRINA TIRVENGADUM  is a deaf British Mauritian visual artist based in London, working across collage, digital illustration, generative AI, graphic design and photography. Her artistic practice explores her family history in Mauritius and reflects on the impacts of colonialism, diaspora, and archival absence. Through visual storytelling, she explores themes of identity, belonging, and intergenerational memory. With a degree in Photographic Arts from the University of Westminster and a career in graphic design, Tirvengadum’s practice bridges personal experience with broader social histories. She is the founder of WAH, a platform that promotes inclusivity in digital spaces. Her art offers a vivid and honest portrait of what it means to reclaim presence, both for herself and for those historically left out of the frame.

BINDI VORA is an interdisciplinary artist of Kenyan Indian heritage and senior curator at Autograph, London. She is interested in how ideas of resistance and resilience are shaped by our surroundings, histories and lived experiences. She has curated a number of exhibitions including: I Still Dream of Lost Vocabularies (2025); Eileen Perrier: A Thousand Small Stories (2025); C.Rose Smith: Talking Back to Power (2024); Mónica Alcázar-Duarte: Digital Clouds Don’t Carry Rain (2024) Eric Gyamfi: Fixing Shadows – Julius & I (2023), Poulomi Basu: Fireflies (2022) amongst others. Her writing has appeared in Another Country: British Documentary Photography Since 1945 (Thames & Hudson); Tate Dialogues: The 80s: Photographing Britain (Tate); FOAM Magazine, ZUM magazine, British Journal of Photography. She is currently part of the working group ‘Climate and Colonialism’ at The Paul Mellon Centre and Autograph, London; and sits on the Arts Advisory Committee at the Imperial Health Charity.