Ayesha Matthan, PhD ‘26, has been awarded the 2026 Joan and Stanford Alexander Dissertation Award in Photography by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH). The annual Alexander Award recognizes scholarship of the highest caliber and promotes excellence in the history of photography.
Matthan is one of only two recipients of the 2026 award. The Alexander Award committee noted that they were impressed by the coherence and originality of Matthan’s research project.
Matthan’s dissertation, "Looking for Bombay: Photography, Labor, and the Struggle for Space, 1960s-1990s," examines the visual fragmentation of the urban poor as Bombay transitioned from a postcolonial industrial hub to Mumbai, a neoliberal financial capital.
This was a period marked by the 1975–77 Indian Emergency and the 1982–83 Textile Mill Strike. The latter marked a critical visual rupture: the photographic focus shifted from the collective agency of unionized workers to the fragmented precarity of migrant laborers. This aesthetic transition occurred in tandem with the rise of the ethno-regionalist politics and culminated in the communal violence of the 1992–93 riots, which decisively reordered the city’s social and religious geography.
Matthan’s research theorizes photography as a central mechanism of visual urbanism that produces and mediates the city's social and spatial complexities and in shaping claims to the city during a period of profound political and economic transformation. Her work demonstrates how diverse photographic forms, from fine art to civic and photojournalism, became a high-stakes visual battleground over the identity and belonging of Bombay’s working classes.
https://static.mfah.com/documents/2026-alexander-dissertation-award-and-past-recipients.8263088327488146403.pdf
Twenty-three Receive Awards Recognizing Excellence and Impact
Cornell University Graduate School
