Dayanita Singh's World of Books

Abstract

Three recent books by Dayanita Singh explore the artist's musings on the deep relations between camera, image, book, exhibition, archive, document, and autobiography. Let's See is a photo-novel culled from her early 35 mm contact sheets from the 1980s and 1990s—a look back at her earliest archives. Book Building explores the act of constructing a book “as a way to deal with one's images, regardless of the final form” (3). Dancing with My Camera is a publication accompanying the first major retrospective of the artist's work, organized for the Gropius Bau, which explores her projects decade-by-decade with essays by various scholars.

These three projects show the evolution and singularity of Singh's work as a book artist, as a conceptual artist, and as a figure who has transformed and conflated our definitions of what it takes to construct a book, an archive, or an exhibition. Singh's main medium is an essential form of photographic communication: the photographic book. As recent scholarship has shown, many more viewers see photographs in book form than framed on the walls of an exhibition or stored in an archive.¹ From the beginning of her career, Singh has highlighted the book format, organizing and reorganizing her work to empower the reader.

Like Singh's numerous previous books, these three projects reveal much about her own processes and history. But I would argue that they also shine a light on some larger issues in photographic bookmaking. Although her early photographic training was in documentary photography, Singh inventively and creatively conflates the distinctions between exteriorizing documentary and inward-looking autobiography. She explodes the somatic concepts of bodily viewing photography so that the acts of physically walking through an exhibition, holding a book in one's hands, and leafing through a file folder become intertwined and inseparable. As an artist trained both in the United States and in India, Singh explores the environments that she knows best in middle- and upper-class urban India. At the same time, the work challenges Eurocentric notions of portraiture that formalize photographic subjects and separate them from the photographer. Singh joins a small number of women for whom books are the most important medium, including Margaret Bourke-White, Germaine Krull, Susan Meiselas, Margaret Morton, and others. In often referencing and reproducing her own mother Nony Singh's photography, she creates a matrilineal line of authorship, thus in some ways reinventing the family album. The universal tone of Singh's works emerges from such deeply personal subjects, including her decades-long friendship with the classical Indian musician Zakir Hussain and deep bond with her close friend, the late Mona Ahmed, who self-identified as part of the hijra community (today understood as a trans community). Finally, many of her topics interrogate machine-age subjects and the technical apparatus used to make and reproduce photographs. For instance, the subtitles of an earlier book project, Museum Bhavan, include the following categories: “Museum of Photography,” “Museum of Machines,” “Printing Press Museum,” and “File Museum.”

Let's See is both a very recent book and a body of work stretching back to the beginning of Singh's more than forty-year career. Published by Steidl, her longtime publisher, it has virtually no text except for five lines by Walter Keller, the publisher of Scalo books. In that one page of text, Keller writes that he likes “visual novels, the novels that lurk in pictures, with a contemporary consciousness of ruptures, blockages, surprises, interruptions.” In a few words he aptly captures the format of this book: simple, yet disruptive in several ways. Let's See is printed with all the images bleeding to the edge of the page so that there is no white space around the pictures, creating an immersive experience akin to filmic viewing. The outer edges of the pages form a pattern of whites and darks reminiscent of wood grain, reminding us of the link between paper and trees. The book consists of 149 double-page image spreads made from 35 mm film, with parts of figures and important details often disappearing into the gutter between the pages. For Singh, complete information is less important than the immersive experience of turning page after page. There are no captions, no names, no table of contents, no listed ordering. The viewer must rely on the acts of looking and imagination to make connections from page to page and across the book.

Upon close examination of Let's See, several themes arise. The cover depicts a younger Singh smiling as she sits in a room, surrounded by curling pages of contact sheets; she portrays the act of photography as one of the protagonists of her story (fig. 1). The last image in the book presents the same room, the same mattress, and the same piles of contact sheets, but the author has removed herself so that the contact sheets of images now speak for themselves. Early pages of Let's See present women in a variety of interior views.

Family members and friends populate other sections, often engaged in affectionate and physical interactions with each other (fig. 2). Singh's younger face appears regularly, sometimes holding a camera pointed at others, sometimes reflected in a mirror with camera in hand so she seems to be depicting herself. In some images, another person may have clicked the shutter. There are wedding scenes, funerals, and military groups. Most of the views are interiors, with a few street scenes interspersed. Arms, legs, faces, and bodies spill out of the edges of some pictures, presenting a studied informality; there are few frontal or formal portraits. After repeated perusal of the image progression, what emerges is a loving, autobiographical look at Singh's sprawling, informal network of friends and family, gathered in intimate groupings that deliberately lack a linear plotline. These ensembles comment on the larger act of photographic practice itself.

Let's See recalls several iconic books whose images are printed to the edges of the pages with no white borders. The most iconic of them, Brassaï’s Paris de nuit (Paris, 1932) evokes night itself with the rich blackness of gravure printing and follows a path through the dream-filled city at night, from dusk to dawn. In a more political vein, Dirk Alvermann's Algeria (East Germany, 1960) documents the Algerian revolution, using the bled-to-the-edge format to convey poetry, violence, and political engagement. This format also recalls the Japanese photobooks of the Provoke movement in the 1960s, most memorably Daido Moriyama's Shashin yo sayonara (Farewell, Photography) (Tokyo, 1972) and Kikuji Kawada's Chizu (The Map) (Tokyo, 1965), although the grainy, blurry, out-of-focus aesthetic of these Japanese books is replaced by Singh's clear imagery. Singh labels her book Let's See as a photo-novel, thus evoking the memory of the first photo-novel ever made, Germaine Krull's early collaboration with Georges Simenon for the mystery story La folle d'Itteville (Paris, 1931). For all of the photographers, the book is a three-dimensional experience; black and white images seem to walk to the edges of the pages and out into the world. Unlike Brassaï, Alvermann, or Krull, however, Singh focuses closer to home, concentrating on family and friends and their environments. Singh's books are like an extended family album, stemming from documentary photography and transforming into a poetic form.

If Let's See is an autobiographical photo-novel that becomes universal, Book Building explores the technicalities of Singh's reinvention of what constitutes a photographic book. Book Building (fig. 3) was also published by Steidl in 2022, but it is a didactic investigation, almost a workbook, as well as a finished product. As Gerhard Steidl states in the introduction, Singh uses the offset lithography of book production as her medium, rather the silver print. For him, “the book is art” (7). Singh uses the term book building as a process to deal with images regardless of their final form, where “books transform into book objects, where the book itself is the exhibition.” The publication is a collaborative effort, not just with Gerhard Steidl but with others who Singh has invited to comment on earlier book projects, including Zakir Hussain Maquette, Museum Bhavan, Pocket Museum, Museum of Chance, and Sent a Letter. The writers include photographers, graphic designers, curators, critics, writers, and art historians.

As a compendium and workbook of Singh's photographic books and book-building processes, Book Building is divided into several sections: “Photo-Architecture,” “Book-Object,” “Photo-Fiction,” “Photo-Letters,” “Photo-Biography,” and “Book Stories.” Book Building comments on Singh's multiple books throughout her career and on the fluidity between books and exhibitions. Notably, many of the sections end with Singh's instructions on “How to Turn the Book into an Exhibition” (fig. 4). This radical act gives curatorial power to every reader instead of limiting it to museum professionals.

These instructions often suggest that one need only buy a number of books, download the blurb from the publisher's website, and place the books on the wall—or in coat pockets, in the case of Pocket Museum—changing their placement from time to time. Singh even toys with the notion of market value, suggesting that a book used in this way can be resold “for a slightly higher price, as it now carries the provenance of your exhibition” (19). As a workbook on “book building,” this is a fragmentary collection of impressions, but as a riff on the unstable intersection between book, archive, exhibition, and print, it is fascinating and thought-provoking.

Kajri Jain's introductory essay draws the linkages between Singh's practice and the larger field. It begins by revealing the only thing Singh ever stole: a copy of Robert Frank's The Lines of My Hand (Tokyo, 1972). And Frank's photobooks—both The Americans (Paris, 1958; New York, 1959) and The Lines of My Hand—cast a long shadow here. Singh employs a dance-like organizing force similar to what Frank used. The National Gallery of Art curator Sarah Greenough likens Frank's editing to jazzlike riffs whereas Jain observes that Singh's cadences owe much to Indian classical music.²

Finally, Dancing with My Camera, published by Hatje Cantz for a summer 2022 retrospective exhibition at the Gropius Bau in Berlin, encompasses the analyses of many scholars and colleagues who interact with Singh's work (fig. 5). Edited and curated by Stephanie Rosenthal, the director of the Gropius Bau, the book includes essays by photographer and writer Teju Cole, art historian Jain, cultural anthropologist and ethnomusicologist Ahona Palchoudhuri, and longtime curator Thomas Weski, among others.

Rosenthal's introductory essay begins with Singh's student days at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, addresses her studies at the International Center of Photography in New York, and comes up to the present. She highlights Singh's disruption of the spaces between exhibition and book, and her exploration of a flexible, nonlinear, and ever-evolving and nomadic “third space” between the two, sometimes as book-museums, sometimes as book-objects, and other forms. Museums are created in book form, book-objects house her books, bookcases reside in leather suitcases. Rosenthal's essay, like Singh's work, can be read backward, forward, inside out, or in a circle. She honors and echoes Singh's use of the body and movement. Rosenthal reminds us that Singh holds her camera “at the level of her belly,” a reference to the low positioning of the Hasselblad camera she often uses (7–9). She recalls a 2013 conversation when the photographer told her, “When you're working from the belly you work very differently and then your vantage point is also very different because it's actually a child's vantage point, or at least on my belly that's what it is. And you're just making a sort of dance around” (8). This kind of dancing movement explodes the conventional role of a static sitter and a photographer frontally facing her subject.

From the visceral Hasselblad belly-centered point of view, Rosenthal continues to analyze Singh's somatic or embodied experience with photography, highlighting the photographer's obsession with touch, with bodies touching, hands gesturing, postures, and image birthing. Singh is fascinated with dance—Mona Ahmed dancing, her mother dancing, and the music of Hussain's performances. This extends into the vernacular dancing of her family and friends’ bodily embraces and hugs as they lounge on beds and sofas in her community. Rosenthal cites Donna Haraway's comment “making kin not babies,” a notion of connections outside of normal family structures. Following this concept, Rosenthal notes that Singh creates kinships in her images and books, often between people who would otherwise perhaps never share the same space (37–39). The bodily comments often have a feminine gendered quality; Singh calls her camera her “third breast” (29).

In another essay for Dancing with My Camera, “Photography beyond the Photograph: Dayanita Singh's Theory of Photography,” Jain continues the metaphor of Singh's “third breast” and adds a reference to yogic breathing, stating that Singh shoots “not from a concealed, static eye but with a gentle glance via her belly, the shutter coming down in the stillness of the gap between inhale and exhale” (57). Jain's essay also examines the culture Singh participates in, concentrating on family photographs that “span generations” and often highlight mothers and daughters. Jain also explores the marketplace commentary that Singh constructs for her books and exhibitions, making sales a kind of personalized dance: “Her ritualized performances of selling both make explicit the commercial aspect of the artwork and, at the same time, dispel any illusion of its separation from the aesthetic and the social by turning the moment of sale, like the processes of photography and display, into a matter of sociality and aesthetic pleasure” (58). Books can be sold, reconstructed, hung on walls, reorganized, even worn.

Ethnomusicologist Ahona Palchoudhuri's essay, “To Play a Piece of Photography,” explores the relationship between Singh's photography and Indian classical music during Singh's time traveling with musician Hussain in the 1980s and afterward. These musician's road trips, too, form a kind of family, and the bodily interactions in the images resemble dance. Hussain commented that his training taught him to play a piece of music and that in the same vein, Singh's training “had taught her to ‘play a piece of photography’” (74). Palchoudhuri examines Singh's photographic usage of the musical notions of raag (the “emotional grammar by which to connect musical notes”) (76), taal (the metric framework of classical Indian music) (80), and riyaaz (“the devoting of one's life towards ‘learning to learn’”) (82).

Thomas Weski's essay “On the Photography of Dayanita Singh” comments on the photographic documentation that Singh's mother Nony Singh made of her family, and the arrangement of these images in family albums. He relates this to Singh's first training in book design while studying at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad in 1980. Singh has practiced book building for her entire career, beginning with her first book dummy Zakir Hussain and most recently with Let's See. In this way, Singh mines and remines her archive of images. Weski reminds us that Singh's photographs are the “raw materials” of her oeuvre, and comments that its “starting point may have been in India, but in its universal significance, it transcends not only its origins, but, moreover, the boundaries of photography as a medium in its own right” (96).

Dancing with My Camera ends with a very useful book timeline and shorter essays on specific projects. Throughout all three books and all her work in general, Ahmed, Hussain, and Nony Singh recur regularly, interspersed with the larger community of Dayanita Singh's life, continually reframed and restructured in works, exhibitions, books, and installations spanning the forty years of her career. As a book experience, Let's See is the purest way to experience her kaleidoscopic approach to her work, as it has only five lines of text and the photographs speak for themselves. Book Building is a primer on her methodology of constructing books, objects, and what Gerhard Steidl calls “the architecture of Dayanita's creativity” (7). Finally, Dancing with My Camera affords a scholarly view into her astonishingly rich career. All in all, 2022 was an extraordinary year for Singh, not only for winning the prestigious Swedish Hasselblad Foundation Award, but for these three books spanning her entire career of mining her own archive.

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