Nimmi’s card simply depicts the actress Nimmi, a major star in the 1950s and early 1960s. There is no mention of the film on the card, and in that way, it is an anomaly within the genre of the Lobby Card. I don’t know why Nimmi, or rather the character she is playing here, is in tears. Her gaze is intense, and I can’t help but be drawn in.

It doesn’t really matter what caused her grief, (or is it anger?). Over sixty years later, this image could now be Woman Crying, Indian Woman, Grief, Beauty, Rage, Vengeance, Love, Desire, Longing, Pain, or Release…

Untitled, Jagte Raho. 1956

Raj Hath, 1956

There are a set of beautiful photographs in the MAP Collection, depicting famous actresses from the Golden Age of Bollywood, all of whom are in tears. I found four such images, and they belong to an especially fascinating genre of photography that is now lost to us – the Lobby Card. Lobby Cards were collectible cards, printed with scenes from a film, and served as advertising for the film being screened in the movie theatre at the time. They were often displayed in the lobbies of these theatres, giving these cards their name.

Although I am aware that each of these cards is from a different film, with different stars and different plots, in bringing them together, I have a fascinating mini archive of emotion.

Ranpakhre, 1956. Unknown

Yes, I know, that I can find out exactly why each of these women are shedding tears, and who they play in the films that made them cry. Perhaps one is a wronged woman, another has lost the one she loves; perhaps one has just received terrible news, and another has resolved to take revenge.

Lobby Card for the Film 'Zindagi Ya Toofan', 1958

In bringing them together, I feel like a curator of tears. I’ve built my own little museum within a museum. Archives are fields of play –  the material they hold can be decontextualised and re-contextualised in both objective and subjective ways. This is a slightly dangerous game – as the curator, I create the narrative I present to you. The further in history we move, and the more removed these images become from our lived and known realities, the more I can extract from them without needing their original referents.

More and more, these women turn into symbols in the archive and given that they were already film stars, playing characters (archetypes even), there is a double act of symbolism at play. I wonder, how tenuous the links are between the material truths of an object – these are Lobby Cards, they are film stills from Bollywood movies, they served as advertisements for people to collect – and their transformation within the archive.