Taking a Book for a Walk: A Conversation with Dayanita Singh

Daniel Boetker-Smith (DBS): The notion of the “book object” is one that you return to again and again in your practice. Where did this obsession come from?

Dayanita Singh (DS): Actually, the obsession emerged from photography itself. I came to photography with the understanding that you made photographs exclusively to go into an album; I'd been taught this by my mother. I myself started photographing in the early 1980s, and the idea that you would have a public exhibition of photographs just didn't even exist for me. It was simple: you made photographs, you made a book—photographs were made to go into a book. I used to buy four hundred feet of Tri-X (Kodak) film and cut it and roll it myself, and I could barely afford the paper to print my photographs on, so I made images sparingly.

DBS: But this obsessiveness in you, what do you put it down to?

DS: My mother! My mother was an obsessive album maker, and the only trauma in my otherwise wonderful childhood was that I was photographed constantly. So because of that, the last thing I wanted to be was a photographer, but, naturally, I became a photographer. To me, photographs just meant books, so in my time studying at the National Institute for Design (New Delhi) I was using my classes as an opportunity to work with photographs in the book form.

DBS: And so in terms of photographic education, was that from your mother too?

DS: No, it was more formal; after graduation at the National Institute I traveled to New York and studied Documentary Photography at the ICP (International Center of Photography) in New York for a couple of years. Following my subsequent graduation from ICP, I came back home and worked as a photojournalist for two or three years, and that was a real education. What that time taught me was how photography is disseminated—by that, I mean the fact that if your work was on the cover of a book or magazine (at that time) it could be seen by hundreds of thousands of people. It made me see the contrast between photography in terms of the book, and then photography in terms of different methods of dissemination. This was in 1992, and the idea of the photographic print exhibited on a gallery wall was still quite alien to me at this stage.

DBS: So what happened to take you away from working as a photojournalist?

DS: That happened because of Walter Keller (of Scalo). I went to his bookshop on Weinbergstrasse in Zurich; I remember the shop also had a small horseshoe-shaped gallery with some photographic prints on display. Seeing it for the first time, what was notable about the shop was that there were no books on the wall, and there were no shelves. All the books were on tables, and seeing this, the way he treated the books, I knew I had to meet this guy and try to work with him. Of course, in that moment I was told by the receptionist that I couldn't see him, as I didn't have an appointment. I'd got the usual rejection, as at that time Scalo was a very famous publishing house. I tried my best to plead, “I've come all the way from India, I have to see him, I won't be here again, please let me meet Mr. Keller, etcetera,” all to no avail. So, being young and determined, I went away and made photocopies of some of my photographs and returned to the shop with a package accompanied by a note that said that his receptionist had prevented me from seeing him, and that I loved his shop, and his books; I left my contact details in New York, and that was that. When I got to New York there was a fax from Keller waiting for me saying, “I admire your eye, come back to Zurich.” I often think about that huge leap, just some girl off the street, no references, nothing, just a bunch of Xeroxed photos. I returned to Zurich as soon as I could.

DBS: What was the work you left behind for him? Were you still working as a photojournalist at this stage?

DS: No, when I went to see Walter Keller I had begun working on my family photographs, so I left him twenty or so of those. I had realized that I had say goodbye to photojournalism, as it was just way too hard. I was working not only with prostitutes but also their children, and I got to a point where I had to make a decision to carry on with photography or become an activist to campaign for these women and children. I was losing my way, and I felt uncomfortable about making these pictures morally too, that I was pimping out these pictures to make a living. Since then I have seen how other photographers have dealt with this sort of subject matter successfully, but at the time I just couldn't find a satisfactory way to deal with it personally. And so that lead me to stepping back and doing this series of family portraits (fig. 2).

DBS: What was making your 2001 Scalo book like? I mean, the experience of shooting, producing it, and getting it to the stage to publish it?

DS: Well, in fact, it didn't happen for a long time. What Keller said to me was so unexpected, he told me he loved my work and said that I would one day be a “great” photographer, but he told me to stay away from doing any exhibitions or books, he didn't want me to slow down in terms of making work. I totally took his advice and spent the next seven years just working on my personal work, on the family portraits and whatever else I wanted to. I didn't have an exhibition until 1999 at his gallery. I was lucky enough during this time to get a grant from Robert Frank of $10,000, which I was able to spread over three years. It was called the Andreas Frank Foundation grant, something that Robert created in memory of his daughter who died in a car accident. The grant was designed to support projects that nobody else would support, he didn't ask to see my work, Keller had simply told him that he had come across this kid from India who was doing family photographs that no one was supporting. After the show in Zurich (in 1999) a flood of exhibitions were offered to me, and for the next six or seven years I did a whole host of exhibitions in what you might call a “traditional” manner, photographs in mattes and frames hung on walls. I spent my time printing my work in New York, as it was easier to source materials there, I wanted only Forte paper, and I liked to selenium tone my prints. I made this one book with Scalo, Myself Mona Ahmed (2001), and then soon another, Privacy (2004), with Steidl (my first with him). This was because Scalo started to sink into bankruptcy. Before this first book with Steidl, Gerhard sat me down and asked me a simple question: Do you want to make catalogs for your exhibitions, or books? I liked his way of thinking, as for some time, I had this sense of awkwardness about the exhibition format and process. The book to me seemed so much more natural and exciting, and full of potential. When I saw the books it felt like my work. The notion of the exhibition to me by this time had become almost a weak illustration of the good things that were going on in the book. Since then the book has come first, conceptually, and the exhibition followed.

DBS: Thinking about these two books, Privacy—the first book you did with Steidl—and Go Away Closer, there is a distinct difference that I can see. Go Away Closer is so much more meditative; this might be because it feels more empty (in terms of people), but also it has a melancholic and more personal tone to it. Can you talk me through how you moved from one to the other?

DS: By the time I made Go Away Closer I found I couldn't separate out the individual works from the series (of photographs in the book), I would get upset that people would buy one image from the series, so I tried to, in a way, sneak my book into the frame. So that if you bought the work, at some point in the future you may open the double frame up and find the rest of the book's images hidden away in there. I wanted to know that people had the whole work, not just a part of it. Privacy was made in conjunction with an exhibition, at the Hamburgerbanhoff in Berlin, and I was new to what a book could be. But by the time we got to make Go Away Closer I had traveled and seen much more, and had an education of sorts, through incredible conversations with people about photography and about my work. It's right what you've noticed, I found that in Go Away Closer I didn't have to make a series and that I could edit my work from a certain emotion. The picture of the girl on the bed in Go Away Closer came out of this emotion, the push and pull of love, and of photography itself. I went back to Delhi and I went through my contact sheets and used this sense, this emotion, to search through my images.

DBS: What is it like working with Gerhard Steidl?

DS: Working with Walter Keller and then Gerhard Steidl gave my self-confidence a huge boost, this was true for Steidl especially, he told me to come back with anything I wanted to make into a book. When I came to him with the Go Away Closer images, he could tell it wasn't going to be a huge seller, but he wanted to do it anyway. When I saw him I also had with me a moleskin notebook with these exact words on the cover, and he saw this and said, “That's the cover, that's the title,” and so the book became this notebook type of publication. Looking back it was a very important book to me, it was very simple, and it gave me a freedom in terms of editing, and sequencing, and then production. This was when my world changed, when you are younger you are looking to everybody else to see what they are doing, and with Go Away Closer I began to appreciate that I could have confidence that I knew what I was doing. Having Walter and Gerhard express their excitement about my work was a central part of this confidence, with that backing, the sky was the limit.

DBS: What a gift that is! I noticed a similar thing in the past when teaching, and when running photobook-making workshops, that the conversation always needs to come back to the question of simplicity. Together with the student the task is to work out what the essence of the work is. Once you've unpicked that lock, the student then has the confidence to pare their work back. I see that in Go Away Closer, it is confidently simple, and it feels singular in its vision.

DS: Yes, I say this to my students too, but they don't listen (laughs)! I often say, “Let the images dictate their form.”

DBS: Let's move on to Sent a Letter, my favorite book of yours, and a book I have included in many of my writings and lists of “best books ever” for international publications (fig. 3). Was Sent a Letter a changing moment or new direction for you? I apologize if I come back to it repeatedly. It certainly was a significant moment for me in my own understanding of what a photobook could be.

DS: Around the same time, I had been traveling to various places with friends, and on these trips I had been making images. On my return I would make my contact sheets and then cut and paste them into small moleskin accordion-fold books as a record of our journey. They were edited and sequenced very loosely, and they were made as a letter for the person I had traveled with. This type of visual letter meant that I felt like I didn't need to fill in all the gaps, because the receiver of the book had been my traveling companion. This meant I could simply include images of the floor, or of a café we had been sitting in, and they would make the connections, they would understand the images as we had shared those moments. So Sent a Letter came out of that: My thirty-second book of this kind was one I made for Steidl when he came to Calcutta. Then he came to Frith Street Gallery, and I laid out all these accordion books on the tables, and I asked him how much he would pay for these works. Funnily he said he would pay nothing for them, but that he would publish seven of them as a book under the condition that I wouldn't reedit the work for publication. Later he asked if I would publish all thirty-two books, but at that time I didn't have the confidence or the courage to make all this work for so many books. So Sent a Letter came into the world, and it was the moment I could see clearly that the book could be the exhibition. Anyone can buy or borrow that book, unfold one or all of the books, and experience it as an exhibition.

DBS: Yes, I wanted to move on to this question of the book as exhibition, and the exhibition as a publication.

DS: To me photography is about moving the work, about it not being static or allowing it to fossilize behind the glass on the wall. Even though I have done that several times, and exhibited my work in a formal gallery space, I am constantly in search of other ways. I'll give you an example, in January 2008 I was walking down Park Street in Calcutta and I noticed a jewelry shop with empty glass cabinets in the window. I walked in and asked to speak to the owner, I proposed to show some of my books in the empty vitrines, luckily he knew my work and he was delighted to accommodate me. Today, in 2017, they are still there, ten thousand people walk past that shop front every day and see those books unfurled in the windows. It's clear from this example that we don't need the museum, or the gallery, when photography, and in this case the photobook, can become the exhibition.

DBS: What I find interesting, and confusing, is that, for me, your books are central to the development of the international interest in photobook publishing in the last twenty years or so, particularly your books with Steidl. But what I find is that plenty of people within photography and in photobook publishing haven't heard your name, or seen your books. I can't reconcile this, given the huge importance I place on your work, and in particular on your thinking about photobooks. What do you think the reason is for this?

DS: The problem is, firstly, that a lot of what I do happens in India, and not so much internationally. Even though I recently showed The Suitcase Museum at the Sydney Biennale (2016). But more importantly, I think I occupy a space in-between, I'm not really a photographer, I'm an artist who uses photography to make a third form, and that's where the problem is. If The Museum of Chance was just a book, then people would get it, I'd be a photobook maker, however I insisted that Steidl publish The Museum of Chance with eighty-eight different covers. Following this I worked with a carpenter to make the structures to hold the books, and then with another friend who makes a special leather bag that allows me to take them on the plane with me when I travel, so I don't have to pay for insurance. So there is something going on in my practice that the photo world has little patience for, and probably the art world too. I imagine a third space where my work is disseminated through publishing but retains the work's exclusivity as it would in a gallery setting. By exclusivity I don't mean limited editions, etcetera, but I mean the idea that what the viewer is seeing in the gallery is something very special.

DBS: But isn't there a similarity in these ideas, that the gallery creates a space for the work to be, and be read, and the same thing (albeit quite different) happens when you create a book, it's a space for the work to be read?

DS: Yes, but in creating the exhibition in the gallery space, I am breaking the “sacred” sequence of the book. And that's interesting for me because I think I'm very good at editing my work into books, creating a tone, an emotion in the book through the sequencing and selection. In displaying The Museum of Chance the idea is that you can keep changing the sequence of the work, so it moves it away from being just a book (fig. 4).

DBS: The joy of the book, though, is the relinquishing of control that the creator must acknowledge—that I can pick up your book and start at the back, flick to the middle, then to the back again, and then to page one. This freedom is, I think, central to the reemergence of the photobook in recent years, a reaction to the gallery model that saw photography displayed in huge institutions in controlled and structured ways, and that the narratives of the work were predetermined.

DS: Yes, but The Museum of Chance takes this further, I was approached by a US gallery recently to show work, and I directed them to buy the books from Amazon and see what they got. In the end they got twelve different covers and we proceeded to show these in the space as an exhibition.

DBS: Is there a political statement there? “Buy my exhibition from Amazon!!!”

DS: I want to make work that my friends can buy. I want to make work that can be shown quite cheaply, we are all aware of the restrictive costs associated with insurance and shipping etcetera, because when I see the price of some of these exhibitions I think about the money only in book terms. I think, “I could have made two books for that money.” But I'm not sure, this is the first time I have had an extended conversation with anyone about my process. I have published some of my thoughts here and there online, but my work doesn't get written about or examined much; one of the few institutions has taken me really seriously up until now is the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, where there is a massive permanent display of all my book objects. I actually didn't know they had been collecting all of my book works, they have eighty-eight Museum of Chance books on the wall, they have Sent a Letter in vitrines, and the File Room book with a number of different covers. The File Room was an important moment for me, I asked Gerhard Steidl if I we could have ten different colors on the cover, and I also asked if the inside images could be the same size as the image on the cover; he just didn't get it at all until I told him that my intention was to cut up the books to make exhibitions. Once he understood this, he loved the idea, and he sent me unbound books that I could cut up.

This sort of flexibility from Steidl allowed me to start to really explore the exhibiting of these projects. For Reading Cinema, Finding Words: Art after Marcel Broodthaers (2013) (an exhibition that also included Cindy Sherman, Isaac Julien, and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster) at the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto, I asked them to buy copies of the File Room book and to paste up the images, the book was the exhibition, and vice versa.

DBS: It's a very unique approach, I can't think of any other artist or photographer working in a similar way.

DS: I think a lot of the value of my work is about the process, and that's a complicated thing, and I think maybe that's why my work isn't written about too much. It's true that certain works of mine have been written about widely, Sent a Letter is an example of this, the book has been written about as a book in photobook circles, but little has appeared in the discourse about my books as or becoming exhibitions. And I think this ties back to the political nature of my process you asked about. I remember when Gerhard Steidl wanted to make Sent a Letter, he told me about artists in the USSR who would be sure to make small books and would hide them in boxes or packets in the refrigerator, as they weren't to know when they would be raided. For Steidl that was his political connection to my work, whereas for me it was more about the work being mobile, and the possibility of exhibiting the work quickly and easily.

DBS: I'm interested in the terminology you use; I like the idea of an artist struggling or searching to find a name for what they do. I think, in a way, it's actually a really healthy thing to not be able to exactly name what you do, there is something exciting about that.

DS: I've always tried to explain my practice, to give a name to what I do, first I said I made “mass-produced artist's books,” and then I started to say I made “book objects.” With the Steidl publication, Museum Bhavan, I was thinking about the project slightly differently again—I was interested in the idea of the mass-produced and the unique coming together (fig. 5). In Museum Bhavan there are nine books that I call “museums,” and also a book of text with two interviews (one with Steidl and another with Aveek Sen). The books are leporello books, structured similarly to the books in Sent a Letter, but each is a pocket museum with a theme: “Little Ladies Museum,” “Ongoing Museum,” and “Museum of Vitrines” are some of the titles, for example. Each museum could fit in your pocket. Museum Bhavan is being released in an edition of three thousand; each one of the three thousand comes in a unique handmade box. When you order it you don't know what cloth you are going to get on the box; in the lead up to release we shipped three thousand handmade boxes from India to Germany ready to be filled with the books. We made them in India because we were adamant we didn't want them to look like a slick “Steidl” box.

DBS: To finish with, lets return to Sent a Letter—when I show Sent a Letter to students or friends, I am always careful to make sure the first time they see it or experience it is not as a book, but as an exhibition installed in the classroom, or as an object on the table—they see the books unfurled, if you like! It's such a different experience for them, it never fails to amaze them.

DS:Sent a Letter is filled with all kinds of very personal references and stories, it came out of actual letters I sent to friends, but more importantly it works and engages the viewer in its own right as an object. In terms of the future, I'm not interested in seeing where the generic hardbound approach to photobooks is going, while I do love the classic photobooks of Chris Killip or William Eggleston that we all know are seminal, to me this future space I'm thinking about is about form. I think the future of photobook publishing is in its specific “objectness”—it's about the kind of object you make. And this isn't new, you know: Anna Atkins, in making the thirteen editions of her book Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions in 1843, kept adding images to the books so that each edition is slightly different to the other twelve. Not only that, she also designed and constructed these books herself! I sometimes wonder where photography would be if we weren't so enamored with her contemporaries Henry Fox Talbot and Louis Daguerre, and if we had recognized her, early on, as the mother of photography, where would the form of the photobook be today? I can't even begin to imagine what types of publications we would have now. To me the connection to the book form is somewhat lost with some of the contemporary systems in place—for example, a book is designed in New York, printed in China, and the photographer is sitting in Johannesburg—this isn't the way to make a successful tactile object.

For me a book is so much about how it feels in your hand, how it opens, even what the sound of the paper is! I would say to all emerging photographers: study design, study typography, study paper.