Dayanita Singh Livres

The book is well known as Dayanita Singh’s 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: “I will always be a musician. A musician will always be a musician, not just me. He may stop performing but the musician is still there.” 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 bookmaker to come. Shanay Jhaveri’s accompanying essay discusses how Singh came to “make” the original, referring to her student notes and exploring how she intuitively assembled the book, from editing the images to design, setting the ground for the book objects and photo architectures of her later practice.

Go Away Closer is a novel without words. It concerns series of opposites in Singh's India: presence and absence, reality and dreams, tradition and progress. She is able to express the emotion underlying these often abstract concepts, because her photography springs from her own intimate experiences. For example, Singh establishes a connection between her personal losses, and the collective sadness due to lost traditions in the face of technology. Such opposites are ultimately irreconcilable, as embodied by the paradox of the book's title. Singh embraces this uncertainty, and presents visual clues in her photographs into which the viewer can read his or her own biography. Go Away Closer - like all Singh's books- is not about answering questions, but considering the emotion fabric from which they arise.

Dayanita Singh’s File Room is an elegy to paper in the age of the digitization of information and knowledge. The analogue photographer and bookmaker has a unique relationship with paper that is integral not only to the work of making of images, texts and memory, but also to a larger confrontation with chaos, mortality and disorder in the labyrinths of working bureaucratic archives in a country of more than a billion people. The endless rows of files in Indian courts, municipal offices, state archives and other such institutions for the conservation of human data create monuments to knowledge and to the arts of memory. They have their own atmosphere and architecture, rooted both in history and in the present. Archivists spend their lives organizing and conserving these forests of paper; historians and scholars forage in them for voices from the past; and the lives of ordinary men and women get entangled in the bureaucratic and litigious systems with their own copiousness of paperwork and files. Including an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist that relates this book with Singh’s other books and bodies of work, and texts by Aveek Sen that explore the different ways in which the mad world of files and paperwork continue to touch ordinary lives, File Room is itself an archive of archives. It documents, and reflects on, the nature of paper as material and symbol in the work of making photographs and books.

Exploring the innovative concept of a book as an evolving art form, this work showcases Dayanita Singh's journey from her first publication to her recent creations. It highlights her unique approach to transforming books into multi-dimensional objects that challenge traditional definitions. The narrative details her collaboration with Gerhard Steidl, illustrating how Singh's works, such as Museum of Chance, have transitioned through various formats. Accompanied by images and DIY instructions, readers are invited to engage with her art, becoming curators of their own exhibitions.

Dayanita Singh has been making small photo journals of her travels in India for some years now. Each book is made with a certain person in mind, either one she has made the journey with or one that was on her mind during her travels. She makes two copies of each book by hand, one of which remains with her, and the other of which goes to the friend it was made for. A diary with coded images of a time shared. Steidl is pleased to publish seven of these small journals for the first time, along with an eighth journal of her mother, Nony Singh's, photographs of her daughter growing up. The journals are produced in accordion folds so that they can open into mini private exhibitions in her friends' homes, and come housed in a handmade wooden box.

In Dream Villa Singh explores how the night transforms what seems ordinary by day into something mysterious and unsettling. This series of colour photographs presents a landscape which exists as much in the artist’s imagination as in the real world. Singh travels to many different cities never knowing where Dream Villa or its inhabitants will present themselves. It is a place where nothing is quite as it seems to be – it comes alive at night, when all is lit by artificial light and the moon is just ornamentation.

Focusing on the theme of archives, this book highlights Dayanita Singh's innovative approach to photography, celebrating her as the 2022 Hasselblad Award winner. It features her visual essay "Sea of Files" and introduces "Museum of Innocence (The Madras Chapter)," showcasing her exploration of cultural experience and memory. Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk contributes a personal essay reflecting on the emotional depth of Singh's work, which blends humanist portraiture with inventive display methods, challenging conventional museum and publishing paradigms.

Exploring the interplay between architecture and furniture, this work features photographs of chairs found in spaces designed by the influential South Asian architect Geoffrey Bawa. Each chair is portrayed with distinct personalities, reflecting Singh's view of them as more than mere objects. Celebrating Bawa's centenary, the book is designed as an accordion-fold booklet, allowing readers to engage with the content in a curatorial manner, transforming the experience into an interactive exhibition.

"Let’s See" is a photo-novel by Dayanita Singh, reflecting on her early years as a photographer. It showcases previously unseen images from the 1980s and ’90s, capturing moments with friends, family, and significant figures in her life. Singh emphasizes the theme of perception and the unique vision of the camera.