Udayan Sankar Pal is a serious hobbyist in photography and has been interested in it since childhood. Since the time he could go out alone, he tried not to miss any photography exhibition held in his home city, Kolkata. In 2002, he went to Tokyo for a couple of weeks and after he came back, he asked a photographer friend, Joydeep Chaudhuri, if he had missed any exhibitions while he was away. Joydeep gave him 2 brochures of exhibitions that he had missed. This gave Udayan an opportunity to catch a glimpse of at least some photographs exhibited in those exhibitions from the brochures. Fascinated by this aspect, he dug up some old brochures that he had collected before. That was the beginning of his massive endeavor to collect these brochures.

He started taking serious interest in this collection from 2004. A painstaking process of searching and noting names or contact details of photographers from books, magazines, internet, word of mouth, etc began. Each day, he still personally spends some time on the internet to look up photographers by name, name of exhibition, name of gallery or organization. The archive is now more than 5000 brochures strong collected from across the world.

The overwhelming response and interest from all quarters of the World and the sheer number of archival documents he collected prompted the need to transform this personal collection into a serious organization by 2010.