For a generation now, various researchers have studied the history of photography in South Asia. We begin this discussion by asking just how meaningful it is to distinguish the history of South Asian photography from the history of photography in South Asia. We will then proceed to discuss the various themes that have interested historians of South Asian photography: social access to photography across the Subcontinent, photography as an exercise in state legitimacy and control, photography as a document of South Asia’s encounters with ‘modernity’ and travel tourism, the social embeddedness of photography (particularly during the intimately public moments of South Asian everyday lives) and the like. We will also revisit the kinds of efforts that have been made internationally in the past 25 years to create public photo archives related to South Asia and ask what kinds of new scholarship on the history of South Asian photography might be created with the help of such enabling academic architecture.