Aditya Arya’s massive photography museum

Gurugram might be an urban nightmare, but it now has an 18,000 sq.ft. photography museum, India’s first such crowd-funded venture

It’s a rainy August Sunday and people are thronging a popular restaurant down a side road off the posh Golf Course Street in Gurugram. Not unusual for Gurugram, only this restaurant is inside South Asia’s largest not-for-profit photography museum. For those not interested in just food and drink, Museo Camera, Centre for the Photographic Arts, India’s first crowd-funded museum, offers free and paid libraries, lectures, photography exhibitions, unusual objects made from camera parts, kaleidoscopes, impromptu photography sessions and, of course, lessons in contemporary history. So what’s the need for this huge museum devoted to cameras and photography? How does a camera have any relevance in an age when everyone has a camera on them all the time? The resounding answer to that, of course, comes from the stunning works of Reuters photographer Danish Siddiqui, who was executed earlier this year in Afghanistan.