“No Photo Will Ever Stand Alone”: Ramshah Kanwal on Memory, Sisterhood, and the Universe Within

There’s a certain kind of intimacy that lives in Ramshah Kanwal’s lens, an intimacy that doesn’t demand to be seen but instead invites you to feel. Beyond a visual archive, her latest zine, Sisterhood, is an offering. A tender and layered exploration of womanhood in Pakistan, lineage, closeness, and the quiet resilience passed through generations of women. “None of those photos were ever taken with the intention to be in a project together,” Ramshah says “but I was looking at a theme in my work, and I was like, oh, I love to photograph women.”

The photos, taken over three years, move across time and space yet never drift. Their coherence doesn’t come from sequencing or geography; it comes from Ramshah’s belief in connectedness. “No photo will ever stand alone,” she writes in the zine’s introduction, a line that stayed with me long after I put it down. It’s the heart of this body of work and her practice as a whole. “Everything that I do, everything I say, everything I eat, everything I wear lives in this universe. And it has to just all be connected,” she explains. “If I take a photo of something, I might not know why I love it in that moment, but maybe a year later, I’ll take another one and go, ‘Yo, this feels like that photo.’ And it’s like boom, it’s complete now. It lives in my universe.”

In this universe, the personal and the political blur. These are not just portraits of women; they are freeze frames of safety, softness, and strength without showing a single face. “A lot of the women in my family back home have a different perception of the internet,” Ramshah says. “They’d be like, ‘don’t post my face’. And of course I wouldn’t, but it challenged me to photograph women in a way where you can’t see their face. And that became part of my artistic language.”

One photo in particular stays with her: an image of the back of a car with the word ‘United’ written across it in red. “I was crossing the street and I just thought, ‘Oh, that’s so cool,’ and took it. But I didn’t even realize it said ‘united’ until I pulled it for the zine. And I placed it next to this photo of my two cousins’ daughters, they were both wearing red, their reds matched. I was like, oh my God, united in sisterhood. It couldn’t have been more perfect.” From there, the zine grew. “It was very challenging for me, because I had to be cautious of my words. I wasn’t trying to make this about South Asian struggle. It was more about their intimacy, their bond, their closeness.”

That distinction matters. Ramshah’s work doesn’t tokenise. It honours. There is care in every frame, every sentence. “If you’re going to make work using photos of the women in your family, you’re going to make sure that you’re saying something important. You’re going to make sure that you honour the love that you have for these women. You’re going to make sure you’re not exploiting your culture.”

The heart of that reverence lies with her mother. In the zine, Ramshah reflects on discovering that she was born through her mother’s grief, the loss of her grandfather, who passed just weeks before her birth. “She was grieving and then had me,” Ramshah says. “I just pray that my gain comforted her loss.” That moment of inheritance and sorrow intertwined becomes a spiritual undercurrent to Sisterhood. It becomes part of what she means when she talks about the shared burden and gift of being a woman. “It helps me give myself grace,” she tells me. “This is a responsibility, and it’s an important one that I can carry.”

When I ask her how she sees Sisterhood now, as an archive, a love letter, or something else entirely,  she pauses. “I do see it as an archive. It’s like a moment frozen in time, but it’s forever relevant. Because we’re always going to have closeness and togetherness and bonds.” It’s an archive not only of women’s lives, but of Ramshah’s memories, the weather that day, the smell in the air, the fabric someone was wearing.

There is something profoundly moving about how she’s chosen to tell these stories. “A picture is worth a thousand words,” she reflects. “But sometimes a thousand words isn’t enough. And it’s really up to me to tell the rest.”

And she has.

Order a copy of Ramshah Kanwal‘s Sisterhood here