Private Blog 3
Falling into a Rabbit Hole of Stamps
Cataloguing as an assignment was actually a little challenging to get into at first. We were given different source “sets” to choose from: the Harvard Digital Collections, iStock photos, 3D Sky, ten books from the library, printed retail catalogues, even the shipping forecast.
Out of all of that, I ended up on iStock.
From there, I clicked into the first 100 trending searches → saw “stamps” → then “vintage stamps” → and somewhere inside that, “Indian vintage stamps.” That’s where I stopped.
The brief talked about how the relationship between the component parts, and even the value and meaning of each individual part, are shaped by the form of the catalogue itself. In other words, it’s not just what you collect, but how you hold it together.
Once I chose Indian vintage stamps, the big question became:
How do I want to catalogue a country on tiny bits of paper?
By time?
By colonial vs post-independence?
By graphic style?
By colour?
By historical event?
I kept circling those questions while scrolling through this strange, flattened archive of my own country.
Choosing a Story: From Empire to Emergence
Once I stopped panicking about “what is my system,” I realised I wanted to tell a story. That helped.
I started with the Silver Jubilee Commemoration stamps:
- First set of seven stamps, issued 6 May 1935
- Celebrating 25 years of King George V
- Beautiful, formal frames, Indian monuments in the centre, all wrapped in imperial ornament
These stamps were tempting because they were so graphically rich. You could categorise them in multiple ways: by monument, by monarchy, by frames, by geography. But I realised what really hooked me was the timeline, the way they quietly narrated a shift in power, imagery, and voice.
So my first structure became historical movement:
- Silver Jubilee (1935) – colonised India, monuments mediated through a British gaze.
- New Delhi Inauguration set – another six stamps, heavily about architecture and imperial planning; the city as infrastructure for control.
- Independence stamp (15 August 1947) – the first stamp marking India as independent.
- Archaeological and Definitive Issue (15 August 1949) – India’s first major post-colonial series: Bodhisattvas, Ajanta caves, Elephanta sculptures, stupas, war horses, temples. India speaking about itself through its own cultural forms.
- Early 1950s issues – railways, agriculture, Asian Games, telephone lines, surveys, institutions: a country stepping into modernity.
So the catalogue wasn’t just “stamps.” It became 1930s to 1950s, India moving from colony to emerging republic.
Thinking Through Making (While Feeling Like Death)
Even once I had this timeline, I didn’t know what to do with it. Tutorials weren’t giving me a clean “answer” because there wasn’t one. My tutor kept saying: “Think through making.”
The problem: I was also really unwell. Horrible flu, medication, low energy, and that heavy guilt of “I should be working but my body is not cooperating.” So the “thinking through making” stage felt extra hard.
Eventually, I decided on a zine as my container. Initially I wanted to print it in riso — partly because it felt romantic to echo the mis-registered, grainy quality of old stamps. But I also really wanted the colours and graphic details to show properly, so I moved away from riso and made a more stylised, modern zine instead.
The real intervention wasn’t the printing method.
It turned out to be stitching.
When Thread Becomes a Method
As you move through the zine, the thread keeps changing its role:
- Silver Jubilee pages:
I kept the ornate frames and removed the monuments from some stamps, leaving an empty space in the centre. That space is then blocked with dense stitching — threads crossing over like a barrier.
The monuments exist in the original stamp, but my thread interrupts visibility. It’s a way of asking: Whose gaze is this? Who gets to frame what is seen? - New Delhi set:
I stitched the six stamps together like a blanket or duvet. These stamps originally celebrate a city designed and monumentalised for imperial administration. By turning them into a soft, hand-held “fabric”, I’m quietly shifting the power: from rigid, centralised control to something that can be folded, held, and re-owned. - Ashoka pillar page:
One of the early independent-India stamps fills almost the whole page. I cut out the Ashoka emblem separately, wrapped it in thread, then sliced through parts of the stitched area.
It looks like something is breaking open — as if India is cutting through old bindings and starting again. - Definitive & Architectural set and early 1950s stamps:
These spreads use 3D-ish layouts with threads linking stamps across time: from architecture and archaeological sites to industry, railways, sports, telecommunications. The threads act like little timelines or currents, showing how imagery slowly shifts from stone and temples to movement, networks, and global connection.
The last page closes with one of the independence-era stamps again — the Indian flag — stitched differently, as if to say: we’re still in this process of binding and unbinding ourselves.
When I step back, I realise I used at least five kinds of cataloguing in one small zine:
- historical sequencing
- re-representation
- spatial re-grouping
- material intervention (thread)
- and a kind of emotional taxonomy (freedom, control, rebuilding, repair).
So yes, it’s “cataloguing,” but it’s also me trying to hold a country’s grief and growth in my hands.
Written Response: Turning People into an Inventory
Parallel to this, we had to write a response by taking any text from the course reading list and applying inventory or metadata as a method. I picked Marianne Wex’s Let’s Take Back Our Space.
Her work is basically a photographic study of how men and women sit, stand, lean, sprawl, and occupy space in everyday life — a visual typology of posture and power. It shows how women’s positions are often contracted, guarded, learning to take up less room, while men expand, claim space, and move more freely.
For my written response, I:
- wrote a reflection (which I actually loved doing), and
- built an inventory of her material.
I broke it down into categories like:
- Posture – standing, sitting, leaning, cross-legged, slouching, sprawling
- Spatial codes – expanding vs contracting, claiming vs yielding space
- Context – public streets, workplaces, domestic interiors
- Body alignment and composition – direction of gaze, angle of limbs, and so on
It was fun in a nerdy way. It forced me to read her images more slowly, to notice micro-differences: which body leans into a wall, who crosses their arms, whose legs point where.
And this is where I noticed something important:
I couldn’t have done this kind of inventory work without the earlier Methods of Investigating brief. Observation, returning to the same material again and again, seeing what I missed the first time — all of that carried forward.
These methods are kind of holding hands with each other.
You can’t catalogue without observing.
You can’t build metadata without slowing down.
What This Brief Opened Up for Me
Looking back, Methods of Cataloguing wasn’t just about sorting stamps or building neat systems. It was about seeing how every catalogue is already a story, of empire, of independence, of who gets to be framed and how.
It also reminded me that my own way of working is deeply physical and layered: I don’t just think on screen; I cut, stitch, tape, pop things up, and then the meaning arrives through that process.
And in both the zine and the written response, I was really doing the same thing:
- asking who holds power,
- how it shows up in form,
- and how small changes, a thread, a cut, a new category, can shift what we see.
That, I think, is my favourite part of this project: realising that cataloguing, when I do it, is less about control and more about re-seeing.