Visual chronicles of school fairs captured between 1990 and 2000

Tucked away in shoeboxes, photo albums and forgotten drawers across several continents are thousands of pictures taken at the annual fairs of Baranagore Ramakrishna Mission Ashrama High School during the final decade of the twentieth century. Some show hand-painted banners flapping in the winter breeze, others capture students in starched uniforms queued at the sweet stall, and a few catch a candid moment between teachers who have long since retired. Together they form a moving record of a school tradition that brought the entire campus together every year.

The committee behind BRKM Reunion has begun gathering these scattered memories into a single photographic archive so that current students, alumni families and future generations can experience the energy of those gatherings. Fairs from 1990 to 2000 sit at the heart of this work because they span a period of rapid change in India, and they document the moments just before mobile phones and digital cameras made candid photography effortless. Each print carries the texture of its time, from the chemical gloss of Kodak paper to the slightly off-register colours of early colour film.

Many former pupils now live far from West Bengal, including a sizable community across Australia. The archive gives them a way to reconnect with school life without booking a long flight, and it offers organisers a reliable visual reference when planning the next on-campus event. The project is volunteer-led, modest in budget and ambitious in scope, and it depends on the generosity of those willing to part with their personal prints for a wider purpose.

The case for safeguarding faded snapshots

Colour photographs from the early nineties are particularly fragile. The dyes used in many consumer print processes of that era begin to shift within twenty years, especially when exposed to humidity, sunlight or the kind of careless handling that comes with frequent reminiscing. Reds drift toward pink, blues flatten, and the once-vivid school banner turns into a pale ghost of itself. Without intervention, the visual memory of a 1994 Saraswati Puja fair could be reduced to a faded rectangle within a generation.

Beyond chemical decay, there is the very human risk of loss. Albums are thrown out during house moves, prints are damaged in monsoon leaks, and entire collections are sometimes left behind when a relative passes away. Several Australian alumni have told the committee that they only kept one box of photographs through multiple international moves, and that box was nearly discarded before they recognised its value. A photographic archive solves this problem by creating a digital copy that travels separately from the original.

There is also a question of cultural stewardship. The annual fair at BRKM was never just an entertainment event; it was a fundraising exercise, a display of student talent and a community gathering rolled into one. Photographs from this era document how stalls were arranged, which projects were highlighted and how the school presented itself to parents and visitors. Losing them would mean losing a record of institutional identity that no official document can fully replace.

Hidden stories inside the visual record

Looking through the photographs that have already been collected, certain recurring motifs appear. The science exhibition stall always seemed to attract the largest crowd, judging by the lines of students leaning in to examine working models of volcanoes and electrical circuits. The food stalls, run by senior classes, show the same homemade treats year after year: pakoras fried in giant kadhais, sugary jalebis twisted by hand and clay cups of sharbat that left orange stains on white shirts.

A quieter story emerges in the background of many images. Notice the hand-painted welcome arches over the main gate, the neatly chalked class lists posted beside the assembly stage, and the rows of cane chairs reserved for distinguished guests. These details were rarely the subject of the photograph itself, yet they tell a great deal about how the school organised its biggest day of the calendar. A historian working with the archive could trace the gradual expansion of the fair grounds simply by comparing the widest available shots from 1990 and 1999.

There are also candid portraits that carry surprising weight. A group of eighth-standard students goofing around near the stage in 1992. A teacher accepting a bouquet with an expression caught somewhere between pride and embarrassment. A small child in a woollen jumper, almost certainly a younger sibling tagging along, peering at the camera from behind a senior's shoulder. Each image is a small doorway into a specific afternoon, and together they reconstruct something close to the lived experience of the school during a formative decade.

Scanning, restoring, and cataloguing the collection

The technical backbone of the archive is straightforward but demanding. Volunteers use flatbed scanners at a minimum of 600 dpi for standard prints and higher resolution for negatives when they are available. Each scan is saved as an uncompressed TIFF for preservation and a smaller web-ready JPEG for online viewing. Files are named with a consistent convention that includes the year of the fair, the section of the album and a sequential number, which makes long-term storage manageable even as the collection grows.

Restoration work is kept gentle and honest. Severely faded images are colour-corrected, but no element is added that was not visible in the original. Dust spots are cloned out, slight tears are digitally closed, and the occasional missing corner is rebuilt using surrounding pixels. The committee has published a short style guide so that any volunteer working on a batch of scans produces results consistent with the rest of the archive. This kind of standardisation matters because it prevents the patchwork look that ruins many well-meaning community projects.

Metadata is where the archive becomes truly useful. Each image is tagged with the year, the type of event, the names of identifiable individuals where consent allows, and a short caption describing what is happening in the frame. Searchable tags mean that an alumnus wondering whether a particular teacher appears in the 1997 prize-giving photographs can find an answer within seconds rather than paging through paper albums for hours. The collection is mirrored on a secure cloud service to guard against the loss of any single device.

Privacy and copyright rules that matter here

Because the BRKM community has many former students now living in Australia, the archive must respect Australian privacy expectations as well as Indian norms. The Privacy Act 1988 sets out how personal information should be handled, and while photographs of identifiable individuals are treated differently from text records, sensible practice still applies. Identifying tags are only added when the person pictured, or a close relative, has given clear permission, and faces of minors from the 1990s are discussed carefully before any name is published online.

Copyright is another consideration. In most cases the photographer holds the rights, and for school events this usually means the school administration or the individual teacher who took the shot. The archive accepts donations only after the contributor confirms they have the right to share the image, and a simple release form is kept on file. For older prints where the original photographer is unknown, the committee applies a cautious approach and uses the images only in ways that clearly serve the school community rather than commercial ends.

Storage and access policies also need to be transparent. The committee has committed to storing digital files on infrastructure located in jurisdictions with strong data protection rules, and to limiting public access to lower-resolution versions when higher-risk material is involved. Anyone with concerns about an image can write to the committee and ask for it to be reviewed, removed or further restricted. These small procedural choices turn a casual collection of photos into a properly governed community resource.

How alumni down under can take part

Time zone differences between Kolkata and Australia make synchronous collaboration awkward, but asynchronous contribution works extremely well. Alumni in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide have already sent scans of prints they have carried with them since leaving India, and the committee has set up a simple submission process through the website. Contributors can upload high-resolution scans, attach the original print for return if desired, and fill in a short form with whatever context they remember about the photograph.

Local meetups have proven useful as informal scanning days. A handful of former students gathered at a community hall in Parramatta last winter and spent a Saturday scanning each other's prints on a borrowed flatbed, sharing stories between each pass of the lid. Similar gatherings have taken place in Carlton and in the western suburbs of Brisbane, often combined with a shared lunch that mirrors the food stall culture of the school fair itself. The committee welcomes suggestions for new venues and is happy to provide guidance on scanner settings for anyone willing to host a session.

For those who prefer to work from home, the simplest contribution is a clear, well-lit scan at the highest resolution the equipment can manage. Even slightly imperfect scans are valuable, because the team has the technical skill to clean them up later. The committee is also interested in oral recollections that can be paired with images, since context makes a photograph far more meaningful than a caption alone. Anyone unsure where to start can read through the contributor notes on the site before posting material.

Linking the nineties to today's gathering

The archive is not an end in itself but a working tool for the reunion committee. Photographs from the 1990s help current organisers see how the fair grounds were laid out in earlier years, which stalls drew the biggest crowds and where the stage traditionally stood. When planning a contemporary gathering, the committee can draw on this visual reference rather than relying solely on memory, and it can highlight specific anniversaries such as the twenty-fifth reunion of the class of 1998 with appropriate historical photographs.

Recognition of longtime contributors is built into the project. Alumni whose photographs appear in the archive, and who have given permission for their names to be associated with the images, are acknowledged in the annual report and on a dedicated page of the website. Several Australians who lent scans have spoken about how satisfying it was to see their faded prints restored and shared, sometimes for the first time, with classmates they had not spoken to in decades.

The archive also feeds into the broader work of the committee beyond reunions. Images from the nineties are used in newsletters that promote the study centre, the medical camps and the educational materials programme supported by the alumni body. Seeing a young version of themselves helping out at a charity stall turns out to be a powerful motivator for former students considering a donation, and the committee has noticed a steady rise in contributions whenever archival material appears in fundraising appeals.

A living archive for the next generation

What makes this project distinctive is that it is designed to grow rather than close. New contributions arrive every quarter, the technical standards are revisited as better tools become available, and the metadata schema is refined as researchers and family members ask new kinds of questions. The committee treats the archive as a garden rather than a museum, with a curator's eye and a gardener's patience. Each small addition strengthens the whole.

There is also an educational dimension that goes well beyond nostalgia. Current students at the school can study how their predecessors organised an event, raised resources and served the wider community. Teachers can use the photographs to illustrate lessons on social history, photography or even colour chemistry. For alumni whose own children are now of secondary school age, the archive offers a way to share a piece of family heritage that might otherwise feel distant or abstract.

Looking ahead, the committee hopes to extend the archive into the 2000s and beyond, capturing the digital era on its own terms rather than treating it as an afterthought. The same care applied to fading paper prints will eventually be applied to phone photographs, social media posts and short videos from more recent fairs. If the nineties collection is any indication, the photographs of the 2020s will one day feel just as precious to a future generation of alumni as these 1990s prints feel to former students today.

Ways former students can support the project

• Search personal collections for prints, negatives and slides from 1990 to 2000 and prepare them for scanning at the highest possible resolution.
• Confirm copyright and privacy considerations before donating, including the identities of any minors pictured, and complete the simple release form provided by the committee.
• Offer to host a small scanning gathering in an Australian city such as Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth or Adelaide, or volunteer remotely to clean and catalogue existing scans.
• Pair photographs with short written recollections so that future readers understand the context behind each image.
• Spread the word among classmates, encourage them to register on the alumni platform, and mention the archive in any group chats or social media circles where former students are still active.