Vanishing World

A personal archive of longing across lost cities

During a 2001 trip to India, Qamar took this self-portrait inside a family home in Kolkata, which was part of a guided city tour conducted by an Englishman. The house, she recalled, belonged to “an aristocratic family” and, though not very big, had ornate architecture, furniture, checkered floor tiles, and “a very Bengali essence to it.”

PHOTOGRAPHS BY Qamar Bharoocha Bana TEXT BY Umer Sheikh

29 August, 2026

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I SAT ACROSS THE ROOM from Qamar Bharoocha Bana in her sea-facing apartment in Clifton, an upscale seaside locality of Karachi. The December sky was a soft amber with the evening fast setting in. She was quiet, turning a stack of photographs over in her hands as she settled into her canvas director’s chair beside the window overlooking the sea. Down at the beach, people moved in pairs and small groups, kids trailing behind or running ahead. It was a while before she spoke. “I most certainly miss Bombay, although I have a strong feeling that now it’s not the same Bombay that it was when I was growing up. I could feel the change happening all around me when I visited the last time in 2005,” she told me.

Through the winter of 2025, we were going through her archive—West Africa one week, Nepal the next, China after that. That day, it was India. “It’s a shame that I don’t have a lot of photographs from my last trip. You see, I had this uneasy feeling that I was constantly being watched and followed wherever I went. That discomfort was enough of a reason for me not to enjoy the time that I spent there on my last trip.”

This was a far cry from her visit in 2001, when she spent nearly six months travelling across the country, including Kolkata, Varanasi, Rajasthan, Mumbai and Delhi. “I was invited to a close friend’s son’s wedding in Delhi,” she said, and had travelled with her family from Karachi for the event. She said that after the wedding she stayed back “to chase my dreams of making photos of India.” She said she was particularly satisfied with the body of work she made during the trip, with her photos serving as an important record of places and moments that have since changed or disappeared.

The house that Qamar visited in Kolkata during her 2001 trip. Qamar’s archive has many images of old houses and buildings from across the world, from Cairo and Kolkata to Palermo and Tehran. Beyond their architectural details, these photographs preserve a record of places and structures that may have since changed, fallen into disrepair or disappeared altogether.

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