Dayanita Singh
The photography piece of this week is “Go Away Closer” by Dayanita Singh, exhibited at the Hayward Gallery.
The exhibition was the first major UK retrospective of Dayanita’s work. Born in New Delhi, India, Dayanita is the oldest of four. At 18 she left to study Visual Communication at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad. One of her class assignments required her to photograph people’s “moods”. She chose to focus on the celebrated Indian tabla player Zakir Hassain. She continued to follow him and photograph him in his concerts around India, pulling together the material for what would become her first “book object”.
In 1987, she would leave to study Documentary Photography in New York. For Dayanita, becoming a photographer was a way to escape the social expectations she was under. She said “the prevailing mindset back then in India in the 1980s was that women had to get married and bear and raise children. For me, becoming a photographer was the only way of gaining my freedom, escaping those constraints and being able to set off on a trip like anyone else”.
After working as a photojournalist for a London based co-operative for many years, Suyanita felt that her photographs were making no difference to India’s social problems, and she could not go on “earning a living from the distress of others”. She returned home and began photographing portraits of middle-class Indian families to portray the traditional, colonial, and religious India being superimposed by an edgy Western contemporary style. As she began to gather materials for exhibitions, she would create her“book-objects”: a book, an object for display, an exhibition and a catalogue of that exhibition all in one. She would call them the museums of the future, a new type of art gallery accessible to everyone.
Dayanita explores this concept in “Go Away Closer”. It shows that the image is not an end, but a starting point for a process of editing and curating. By being reproduced, each image comes to have its own individual history. The exhibition includes reproductions of Dayanita’s previous work and themed images housed in specially made cabinets.
Sources
https://dayanitasingh.net/go-away-closer/
https://www.apollo-magazine.com/catalogue-photography/
https://www.ft.com/content/037d165e-d9a5-11e9-8f9b-77216ebe1f17
https://www.frithstreetgallery.com/artists/12-dayanita-singh/
https://artsandculture.google.com/story/dayanita-singh-go-away-closer-hayward-gallery/YAWRgN7a8SN-IQ?hl=en
https://global.canon/en/newcosmos/closeup/dayanita-singh/
https://www.artsy.net/artist/dayanita-singh