Page 118 - Eye of the beholder

DAYANITA SINGH [1961-]
Dayanita is an internationally acclaimed photographer known for her creative and imaginative use of the medium. Her engagement with photography assumed diverse forms not limiting it to just prints. She does not manipulate her images digitally but uses it as they are captured in a particular light or setting. As a photographer her primary format has been the book and has twelve books to her credit.
Dayanita's art reflects and expands on the ways in which people relate to photographic images. Her first foray into photography and bookmaking came through a chance encounter with tabla player Zakir Hussain, when he invited her to photograph him in rehearsal after she was shoved by an aggressive official while attempting to shoot him in concert. For six winters following this, Dayanita documented several Hussain tours and, in 1986, finally published the images in her first book, “Zakir Hussain”. Referring to him as her first "true guru", she believes that he taught her the most important of all skills and that was focus.
At a certain defining moment in her career, in the 1990s, Dayanita made photographs of her friends and family who were similar to herself in class and cultural background, sequencing them in a seminal body of work titled “Privacy”. The genius in Dayanita was genetically coded and was therefore inherited. Her mother Nony was a prolific photographer with extensive experience of the medium together with an artistic eye to capture significant moments. She also remained a seminal influence in Dayanita’s varied interests that encompassed extracting subject out of a particular social or a political context and inserting them in a class context.
The art of Dayanita uses photography to reflect and expand on the ways in which relationship to photographic images happens. In a series of Mobile Museums an innovative and creatively original approach to engaging with her photographs, Dayanita drew from her extensive photographic oeuvre, allowing her images to be endlessly edited, sequenced, archived, and displayed. Stemming from her interest in the archive, the museums present her photographs as interconnected bodies of work that are replete with both poetic and narrative possibilities. Publishing is also a significant part of the artist’s practice. In her books, often made in collaboration with Gerhard Steidl, she experiments with alternative forms of producing and viewing photographs.
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