Page 119 - Eye of the beholder

Dayanita’s photographs are seldom about stillness or a final frame. They most often capture bodies and minds in motion and in them are the truths about familial bonds. Temporal transition is measurable to Dayanita through the women of the various households she has come to know. She desired to visually freeze moments in a feminized timeline and she successfully managed it.
The photograph by Dayanita Singh in the Sadhu collection is a family portrait. Amongst the numerous mediums that the Sadhus’ have indulged in in their choice and taste, this is the only work in a different medium, namely a photograph. The work of course is by a leading internationally acclaimed photographer Dayanita Singh, whose creative engagement is well known. She remains a pioneer of sort in her imaginative use of the medium to create different forms using photographs and photography.
In this photo the two women perhaps mother and daughter translate as bearers of time. It embodies both change and stasis. This temporal quality characterizes the timeless quality of Dayanita’s black-and-white style, the classic drawing room furniture, the traditional clothing in the form of the sari draping each of them. It is a semi-colonial interior which gives it an ambient aura of timelessness. While the elderly lady looks in the eye of the lens the daughter perhaps looks into the distance through a window from which light pours in. it is an emotional moment that has been captured, further reinforced by photographs on walls that conveys a sense of history and lineage of the family. Hence the mother and daughter add to the historicity of the portraits on the walls, a sentiment that also expresses their present predicament becoming the future.
SELECT REFERENCES
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dayanita_Singh https://quod.lib.umich.edu/t/tap/7977573.0009.106/--family-intact-an-experience-of-being-photographed?rgn=main;vi ew=fulltext
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