When we read historical texts, we rely on our intellectual conditioning to understand and judge what such texts are conveying. In this experimental talk, I will utilize 19th-century Indian Islamic texts to suggest that anamorphism highlighted in concept-driven photography provides a useful analogy for seeing how historians narratives become containers for irreducibly complex worlds. Historians claims about the past are always equally valid and distortive, mirroring the way a two-dimensional image in a photograph captures a three-dimensional world. The analogy helps us appreciate that historical knowledge is a particular form of truth that cannot be mapped to basic notions of objectivity, subjectivity, normativity, and so on. Shahzad Bashir is Dean of the Aga Khan Universitys Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations in London. Amanda Lanzillo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago.