Dayanita Singh

My attention was drawn to the work of Dayanita Singh, the sixty-one year old Indian photographer, by a beautifully written article in the Guardian recently. Images you can smell is an title you can easily entice me with.  Orhan Pamuk, the award winning Turkish author, first met Dayanita in 2001 while writing in Goa. As he stood with her in her half lit studio looking at some of her mono prints he writes “As I studied those photographs in the gloom, some very old and very familiar memories began to surface in my mind. But no, the word “memories” does not suffice. What was coming to life inside me was an emotion stirred by those memories – and it seemed as if those photographs had been taken precisely to capture it.” He goes on to review her work recording Indian archives. Musty, sometimes damp, stained, dust mite ridden bureaucracy from another age.

This was sufficient to make me look at her life more closely. Her achievements are many and this year she won the Hasselblad Award, the first photographer of South Asian descent to do so.

She began as an accidental photographer while studying design at eighteen but quickly decided she wanted to make it her life, eschewing marriage and family life in the process. Indeed she realised that saying she was a photographer not only allowed her access to places and people she may otherwise never been allowing near, but it also freed her from many of the expectations of women in Indian society in the 1980’s.  Her early work, now published as Let’s See is a lengthy series of portraits of families and friends, a feat that she doubts would be possible now. An illuminating interview with her can be viewed here. Her work is principally in mono as she finds the lively colours of India subtract from what is happening in the image itself.

The primary source of her work is her books, of which there are fourteen. They rarely contain text instead allowing sequences of photographs to speak for themselves. She has worked tirelessly to separate her exhibition work and her books. As she says in this interview for Tate  “Exhibitions come and go. Books stay forever.” In creating expanding concertinaed cards of her work that can be placed almost anywhere she has also broken with the idea of exhibitions being only in museums or galleries. She has also created a unit that can be placed in a museum and allows her to visit and change the pictures during the course of the show. Much of her published work has taken years to complete, returning to subjects many times.

Singh also presented the Museum of Chance as a book-object for the first time in India in November 2014 at a show in the Goethe-Institut in Mumbai and in January 2015 at a show in the Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan in New Delhi. The book-object is a work that is a book, an art object, an exhibition and a catalogue, all at once. In order to move away from showing editioned prints framed on the wall, Singh made the book itself the art object: a work to be valued, looked at and read as such, rather than being regarded as a gathering of photographic reproductions.

In 2018, Singh released Museum Bhavan as a book. It is an "exhibition" in the form of a book, with "galleries" held in a small box containing nine thin accordion books that expand to a 7.5-foot-long gallery of black and white photos drawn from Singh's archive. In 2017 Museum Bhavan won PhotoBook of the Year in Paris and was subsequently awarded the Infinity Award in 2018. This “museum” also takes a physical form and can be viewed here as a walk-through.

Her work has been shown world-wide and her reputation is only likely to grow.