Dayanita Singh

This is the long-awaited new edition of Dayanita Singh’s (born 1961) File Room, her first book on archives, published by Steidl in 2013. Singh’s images of archives and their custodians across India examine how memory is made and how history is narrated. Her photographs bring to light the paradoxes of archives: while impersonal in their classifications, each is the careful handwork of an individual archivist, an unsung keeper of history whose decisions generate the sources of much of our knowledge. Archives are vessels of orthodox facts but also the home of neglected details and forgotten documents that can unsettle the status quo. As the pace of contemporary India accelerates, what will become of the archive? Singh prompts us to imagine archives not merely as documents of dusty scholarship but as monuments of knowledge, beautiful in their unkempt order.

In the early 1980s, with her very first camera in hand, Dayanita Singh (born 1961) traveled throughout India for six winters with the tabla maestro Zakir Hussain, photographing several great classical musicians and creating an image archive of them on stage and backstage, in their homes and on the bus transporting them from concert to concert. When the time came for Singh to edit her work into a book, she chose to focus on the tanpura—a long-necked, four-stringed drone instrument that both evokes and supports the musician’s voice, both during performance and the process of daily practice of riyaz. Museum of Tanpura celebrates the tanpura as a musician’s constant companion, the environments and relationships which bring music into being, and embodies what Singh sees as her greatest lesson from the performers she befriended—the rigor and aesthetics of riyaz.

Ever since Museum of Chance (2015), and particularly in her award-winning Museum Bhavan (2017), Dayanita Singh (born 1961) has created museums in book form—little offset symphonies that create a fluid space between the museum/gallery and publishing. Now, in Museum of Dance, Singh collects all the images of people dancing that she made in the 1980s and ’90s—from her mother, Nony Singh, her friend and collaborator Mona Ahmed (subject of Singh’s 2001 visual novel Myself Mona Ahmed), to classical dancers and the renowned Bollywood choreographer Masterji. Published to coincide with her traveling retrospective Dancing with the Camera, this book is Singh’s tribute to dance, as well as her exploration of photography and bookmaking as metaphorical forms of dance—where rehearsed and spontaneous rhythms combine through intuition in unpredictable ways.

The archive has long been an obsession for Dayanita Singh (born 1961)—both literal archives, treasuries of objects chosen with care and preserved against time, and the photobook as a moveable archive which the viewer can revisit and display at will. In Pothi Khana (Hindi for “archive room”), Singh presents photographs of India’s seemingly endless private and public archives: shelf after shelf of bundles wrapped and knotted in pieces of cloth once colorful but now almost white with age. The documents within these bundles remain known only to the archivists who are curiously absent in Singh's images, their presence implied from the spaces they normally inhabit: chairs, desks, doorways, halls. Originally exhibited in 2018 at the 57th Carnegie International as a group of modular, pillarlike wooden structures whose photographs could be endlessly resequenced, Singh now transforms the mobile sensibility of Pothi Khana into this volume, which she sees as a compendium to 2013’s File Room.

After many years spent documenting poverty in her homeland, Dayanita Singh (born 1961) began to ask herself: what can a photographer in India document that is neither catastrophic nor “the exotic”? Her answer was to portray the flipside—India’s well-to-do families and their fine homes. Both on commission and on her own, she created a portrait of another side of Indian society—one from which she hails—complete with its traditional and postcolonial symbols of wealth.
India’s wealthy elite is virtually unknown to the West. First published in 2004, Privacy depicts a closed world characterized by tight family solidarity. Singh shows the people as they would like to see themselves, in the middle of splendidly decorated rooms and surrounded by possessions. At a certain point in her work, Singh realized that even without their residents, the rooms were occupied by the invisible generations that had lived there before. Accordingly, the book closes with photographs of empty interiors.

This book is Dayanita Singh’s (born 1961) meditative, sometimes melancholic exploration of work environments across India. Each of its three visual chapters springs from larger individual series in Singh’s archive which she has now reedited around the theme of work. The first series, Museum of Machines, presents black-and-white images of factory equipment, stately despite its grime, and only occasionally joined by human counterparts. Blue Book shows photographs of industrial landscapes Singh made on her wanderings—atypically in color, the serendipitous outcome of running out of black-and-white film—which form a poetic critique of the sites of labor. Go Away Closer returns us to black and white, and reveals the greatest range of subjects, from thousands of scooters in a warehouse to the charming clutter of a shop, and are taken from a series Singh originally edited according to what she calls the "note and feeling" of the images.

Dayanita Singh (born 1961) has long photographed the intriguing cloth bundles of India’s archives, yet Time Measures marks the first time she has made portraits of them. Unlike its sister book Pothi Khana, which shows such bundles within their environments (on overflowing shelves, in the practiced hands of archivists), Time Measures presents these treasures photographed individually and close up against a neutral stone background. Their details are thus revealed: the unique sun-bleached patterns in red, green or blue, the varying shapes and knots (tied and retied over the decades by unseen hands), the outlines of the secret contents within (which remain unknown even to Singh herself). Her images invite a process of slow, attentive looking through which the bundles assume the weathered charm of people’s faces.

This book celebrates Dayanita Singh (born 1961) as the 2022 winner of the Hasselblad Award, considered the most prestigious international photography prize. Sea of Files highlights Singh’s consistent and unique engagement with the archive, both literally and metaphorically. The book includes Singh’s associative visual essay Sea of Files in its entirety, as well as—for the first time in a publication—Museum of Innocence (The Madras Chapter) and other series engaging with the meanings and materiality of archives. A personal essay by Orhan Pamuk explores Singh’s photographs of state archives, for him images of aura and melancholy that evoke the “texture of memory,” “an idea of poetic decrepitude and a sense of profundity.” The book furthermore shows how Singh has paved new ways for engaging with photography, be it through humanist portraiture or her innovative display structures and book objects that recast conventions of the museum and publishing.

The internationally acclaimed photographer Dayanita Singh often describes herself as a “book artist.” Accordingly, Singh was closely involved in the making of this magnificent exhibition catalog, which accompanies a major touring retrospective of Singh’s work, curated by Stephanie Rosenthal for the Gropius Bau.
The most comprehensive publication yet published on Singh’s photographic art, it includes a series of long-form and short-form scholarly essays, full-color reproductions and installation images. The texts situate Singh’s work in relation to topics such as Indian classical music, photographic lineages and traditions, conceptions of the archive, choreography and the economies of reproduction.
Presenting every important phase in the photographer’s oeuvre, Dancing with My Camera also enters Singh’s archive to include never-before-seen early works from the 1980s, a new series of montages and the works Let’s See, Museum of Chance, Museum of Shedding, I Am as I Am, Go Away Closer and Box 507, among others.
Dayanita Singh (born 1961) is one of today’s most important photographers. Her solo exhibitions have been held at MMK, Frankfurt; Hayward Gallery, London; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Is it a book, an exhibition, a catalog of the exhibition? Is it mass-produced? Is it unique? Dayanita Singh (born 1961) is a book artist who stretches the imagination of what a book can be, transcending the spaces between publishing and art. Book Building traces the journeys of Singh’s books, from the first, Zakir Hussain (1986), to her latest, Zakir Hussain Maquette (2019), showing the spectrum of her book-building process from idea to material object, and how she inventively circulates them in the art world and beyond.

Taking those books she has made with Steidl as a basis, we witness the transformation of books into book-objects which open up new interpretative spaces: Museum of Chance (2014), for example, first became a book-object, then a diptych, a bookcase, a suitcase museum and a book museum, before finally becoming the ongoing museum in Singh’s Museum Bhavan (2017). Book Building documents Singh’s 13 books in images and short texts, along with several DIYs Singh has created with detailed instructions on how to display her books as exhibitions—making us the curators—as well as various performative interventions, from book carts and happenings to installations and tours. At the heart of Book Building is the collaborative process that Dayanita Singh and Gerhard Steidl have established over 20 years: the belief that a book is always in a process of becoming.

A return to a time when Dayanita Singh (born 1961) did not yet consider herself a photographer, Let’s See is the probing remembrance of “an eye I no longer have access to.” Singh has recently poured through 40 years of her archive—80% of which remains unseen—exploring scans of her contact sheets and being amazed by the gentle and tender images from the 1980s and ’90s she had since forgotten—hostel roommates, friends with whom she lived, family, weddings, funerals; portraits of herself and those who would become important characters in her life: her mother, Nony Singh, the musician, Zakir Hussain, and Mona Ahmed, whom she depicted in the emotive visual biography Myself Mona Ahmed (2001).
Singh’s first camera, a Pentax ME Super with a 50 mm lens, was a gift from the German publisher Ernst Battenberg, and with it she “made photos of everything I could, trying to make a roll of film last as long as possible,” creating contact sheets of all her images, but realizing the rare luxury of an individual print only for a publication or a book project. “I call this book Let’s See,” says Singh, “because these images are about exactly that: how we see, what we don’t see, what only the camera sees….”

The book is well known as Dayanita Singh’s (born 1961) primary medium, one she explores to create new relationships between photography, publishing, the exhibition and the museum. But where did her passion for the book as the ideal vessel for her photos, for the stories she tells, begin? The answer lies in Zakir Hussain, a handmade maquette Singh crafted in 1986 as her first project as a graphic design student. The protagonist of Singh’s photo essay is the Indian classical tabla virtuoso Zakir Hussain, whom she captured on the stage and at home with his family. Surrounding the photos are handwritten texts gleaned from interviews Singh made with her sitters, including insights from Hussain himself. This Steidl facsimile edition is scanned from Singh’s original maquette and reproduces all its “imperfections” and idiosyncrasies, including her pencilled notes about the book’s construction—indications of the influential book-maker to come. Shanay Jhaveri’s accompanying essay discusses how Singh intuitively assembled the book.