Indian photographer Dayanita Singh (b. 1961, New Delhi) transcends the two-dimensional boundaries of traditional photography, to create works that offer new ways of experiencing the medium. Her artistic journey started in a bizarre way, as she never would have thought she would be taking up the camera as a professional tool. As a child, Singh was the subject of her mother’s photographic obsession, as she strived to capture as many childhood mementos as possible. However, she encountered tabla maestro Ustad Zakir Hussain, who would become her mentor later, on one night in 1981 during one of his performances. She was a student at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad and was there to shoot a portrait photo of Hussain, but when she was turned away by the theatre guard, she fell down the stairs and embarrassed made her way out. She waited for Hussain at the exit to confront him, but only met with a gentle character who told her she could take his portrait whenever she pleased. After that night, Singh decided she would take up photography as her medium of expression, as it would set her free from the social constraints and prejudices of Indian society and culture, and allow her to face the world with freedom to see the world however she wanted.
Dayanita Singh’s life journey has led her to develop a successful artistic career, for which she has been widely recognised as a groundbreaking practitioner. In 2022, she was the first South Asian photographer to win the Hasselblad Award, worth SEK 2,000,000. In the same year, her four-decades-long career was celebrated in her largest institutional restrospective to date at the Gropius Bau, “Dancing with my camera: Dayanita Singh”, curated by Stephanie Rosenthal. The exhibition travelled to MUDAM Luxembourg in May 2023, and will later feature at the Serralves Museum, Porto, in Portugal from November.
The exhibition spans her entire oeuvre, from her first photographs of the musical scenes surrounding percussionist Zakir Hussain (b. 1951, Mumbai) to her most recent works, including Let’s See (2021), inspired by the format of contact sheets. The work on show touches on a variety of themes, seen uniquely through the photographer’s eye, including music, dance, architecture, the archive, disappearance, gender and freindship.
For Singh, the photograph is “raw material”, which she employs to create a “moving” experience, going beyong the here and now of the image, to transcend the “where” and “when”, the two-dimensions, the first appearance. The artist uses a unique editing process, in which she selects—much trough intuition—images from her archives, to then combine and reinterpret them to create temporary assemblages that fluidly weave together periods, places, figures, architecture and objects.
In the early 2010s, Singh started to incorporate her images into mobile wooden structures, which she called “photo-architecture”, exploring countless narrative possibilities through montage and the juxtaposition of images. These structures take the name of ‘museums’, which can be organised in a variety of configurations, displaying the characteristics of both the archive and the exhibition. The museums can be viewed, explored, walked and danced around to experience the images and their connections.
File Museum (2012) was the first of the kind, and as the title suggests, assembled images of archives in India, photographed in different contexts, like administrative or governmental archives, bundles of documents in offices boutiques or workshops. The Museum of Chance (2013) is for the artist the “mother of all museums”, which potentially could contain all her other museums. Larger than all the others and with a greater number of images, it includes a higher heterogeneity, with 163 prints relating to disparate themes such as dance, music, cinema, places of work and living spaces, as well as people the artist met and those close to her.
Her large-scale photographic installations are but one side of her practice, which includes the use of the book format. An essential part of her creative output, books are “central to photography”, says Singh:
“The wall is there now, it may not be in the future, we don’t know. But the book is critical, because it is a tactile, very private experience. Exhibitions come and go, but the book stays forever.”
Books have the capacity to circulate easily, reach a wider spectrum of audiences in time and space, and they establish a singural, privileged relationship with their readers. Since 2004, she has been collaborating with German publishing house Steidl to create her books.
Singh’s first photographic project was a book, the subejct being her mentor and tabla maestro Hussain. Zakir Hussain: A Photo Essay (1986) is the product of the artist’s experience touring across India with Hussain and other musicians for six consecutive winters. Hussain became her spiritual mentor, as Singh learned from him about the importance of rigorous artistic practice (riyaz) and concentration (dhyaan). In 2019, she published a facsimile of the working maquette of the 1986 book, with all the marks and annotations it entailed (Zakir Hussain Maquette).
Two recent publications on show also have music as subject. In the form of leporello—a book that unfolds like an accordion—they result from new arrangements of older images. Kishori Tai (2021) is a collection of photographs of the Indian classical singer Kishori Amonkar (b. 1932 – d. 2017, Bombay), taken during a Guru Purnima (a sacred day during which the students of a spiritual teacher celebrate and honour them). Musician’s Bus (2021) is composed of images of musicians photographed while on tour, accentuating the intimacy of the bonds that form between them and the different ‘moods’ – in a sense that here takes on a musical quality – that exist within the band.
Singh’s interest in the circulation of images through their reproduction and distribution finds its perfect expression in the book format, but it is one specific work that epitomises what she calls the “possibilities of dissemination”. Often describing herself as an “offset artist”—a nod to the most commong printing technique in publishing—Singhreadily blurs the boundaries between the space of the book and the space of the exhibition in Suitcase Museum (2015).
The work gathers 44 copies of the Museum of Chance book published in collaboration with Steidl in two leather suitcases. This book is unique in that it has forty-four different covers. Each copy features, on its front and back covers, two of the88 photographs published in the book, combined in random order. In the exhibition space, the books are slipped into wooden frames mounted on the wall, while the two leather suitcases remain in the exhibition space. The piece “encapsulates all the key aspects of Singh’s practice—dissemination, mobility, motion and accessibility”.
“Making images is maybe ten percent of my work. And the rest of it is really weaving, editing, editing, editing, then the sequencing”, says Singh, as the importance of the practice of editing is paramount in the creation of her work. This aspect is particularly emphasised with Go Away Closer (2007), in which she shifts from a purely documentarian approach towards a more intuitive relationship to images, marking a turning point in her practice. Comprising 28 photographs from 2000-2006, the work juxtaposes images with contrasting atmospheres, and resonates with the title of the piece, oscillating between proximity and distance, presence and absence, tradition and modernity.
Go Away Closer has often been compared to a novel without words. Here Singh explores the narrative potential of strategies of withdrawal, which she links to the writing of authors like Italo Calvino (b. 1923, Havana – d. 1985, Siena). She explains: “I take out that one image to disorient you. I am not interested in that complete picture that you can hold on to.”
Let’s See (2021) is displayed in a room of its own, with a new format explored by the artist, in which she plays with a mix of characters, bodies, actions, movements, contacts and relationships. The work comprises images taken in the first half of the 1980s, in the artist’s personal environment, in the homes of friends or during her travels. The wooden structures she uses here are inspired by contact sheets (a term that designates the print containing all the exposures of a roll of film on light sensitive paper). As in her ‘museums’, the images here can be organised in an ever changing arrangement, generating new relationships and narratives each time.
A pivotal element in her oeuvre and the exhibition is the work connected to her close friend Mona Ahmed (b. 1935 – d. 2017, Delhi), who Singh described as the most unique person she’s ever met. Singh met Mona, a eunuch, in New Delhi in 1989, during an assignment for the London Times. Living in a third gender community, Mona later became an outcast and went on to live alone in a graveyard, where she died in 2017. Over the years, Singh and Ahmed developed a deeply intimate friendship, which led to the creationg of works such as Myself Mona Ahmed (2001) and the more recent Mona Montages (2021). The first is a biographical, autobiographical and fictional photo-book of Singh’s images of Ahmed accompanied by texts written by Mona herself, while the second comprises 23 photo-montages of manually cut images of Mona and pasted onto prints of other works, such as Privacy (1992–2002), Masterjee (1993/2021) and File Room (2008–2011).
The importance of intimacy and of human relationships in Singh’s practice transpires through the tenderness one senses in these images of Mona. Like her other shots, they might be perceived as unfamiliar, perhaps even exotic for some. However, Singh has the power to capture life in a way that connects us all across cultures, as she makes us experience photography as intimate, personal and unique.
C. A. Xuân Mai Ardia
“Dayanita Singh: Dancing with my Camera” runs from 12 May to 10 September 2023 at MUDAM Luxembourg.