What can a photographer in India capture on film other than disasters or the exotic? Dayanita Singh was preoccupied by this question after she had spent many years documenting the poverty in her homeland. Her answer was a return to the world from which she came, to India’s extended, well-to-do families and their fine homes. Both on commission and on her own, she photographed friends and friends of friends, creating a portrait of another society, complete with its traditional and post-colonial symbols of prosperity.

The self-confident elite of the country is nearly unknown in the West. Privacy provides great insight into 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 that represent their self-image. 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. The book closes with photographs of interiors, empty but still filled with spirits.

Contributions by Britta Schmitz and Dayanita Singh

128 pages

Hardback / Clothbound

20 x 24 cm

English

Steidl

ISBN 978-3-88243-962-5

Dayanita Singh has frequently acknowledged the influence of two individuals on her practice—her mother, Nony Singh, and the tabla maestro Zakir Hussain.

As a child, Singh was photographed frequently by her mother, a doting documentarian of her four daughters. The younger Singh had been an impatient witness to her mother’s unhurried, meticulous methods with analogue photography, but for Nony Singh, the process of documentation did not end with the making of the photograph. Selecting photographs and arranging them in albums was the natural next step for her. She was a collector of memories, the keeper of family stories, which she archived through photographs in neatly labelled albums. The albums, she said, were like her vault; the photographs, her jewellery.

This thought leads me to several decades later, when Dayanita Singh published a series of petite, jewel-like books and displayed them in the window of a jewellery store on a busy central Kolkata street. She packaged the set of seven books in a box wrapped in Markin cloth, a material the Indian postal service uses to pack parcels.

Before their publication, these books had started out as visual letters to her friends. Singh had cut up contact sheets of photographs she had made with particular friends in mind, pasted them into Moleskine notebooks, and sent these to her friends while keeping a copy of each notebook for herself. Like her mother, she was a collector of images that she made with her medium-format camera. Like her mother, who made albums, Singh dipped into her archive and used her photographs as raw material to make books. She packaged them with deliberation, with an awareness of the materials she was using and what they signified. She knew that as her books left for other places they would acquire new meanings in their new lives, but the language that her choice of materials and formats spoke was emphatic in the meaning it conveyed.