Dayanita Singh Book order

A three-part portrait of working conditions and the imagery of industry in India This book is Dayanita Singh's (born 1961) meditative, sometimes melancholic exploration of work environments across India. Each of its three visual chapters springs from larger individual series in Singh's archive which she has now reedited around the theme of work. The first series, Museum of Machines, presents black-and-white images of factory equipment, stately despite its grime, and only occasionally joined by human counterparts. Blue Book shows photographs of industrial landscapes Singh made on her wanderings--atypically in color, the serendipitous outcome of running out of black-and-white film--which form a poetic critique of the sites of labor. Go Away Closer returns us to black and white, and reveals the greatest range of subjects, from thousands of scooters in a warehouse to the charming clutter of a shop, and are taken from a series Singh originally edited according to what she calls the "note and feeling" of the images.

Dayanita Singh has long photographed the intriguing cloth bundles of India’s archives, yet Time Measures marks the first time she has made portraits of them. Unlike its sister book Pothi Khana, which shows such bundles within their environments (on overflowing shelves, in the practiced hands of archivists), Time Measures presents these treasures photographed individually and close-up against a neutral stone background. Their details are thus revealed: the unique sun-bleached patterns in red, green or blue, the varying shapes and knots (tied and re-tied over the decades by unseen hands), the outlines of the secret contents within (which remain unknown even to Singh herself). Her images invite a process of slow, attentive looking through which the bundles assume the weathered charm of people’s faces; the series becomes a shifting taxonomy of portraits. Bound in three different covers and designed to be hung directly on the wall, Time Measures furthermore extends Singh’s project of transforming the book into the exhibition.

Dayanita Singh's photos of archives and their custodians across India examine how memory is made and how history is narrated. These images bring to light the paradox of archives: they are impersonal in their classifications, yet each is the careful handiwork of an individual archivist, an unsung keeper of history whose decisions generate the sources of much of our knowledge. Archives are vessels of orthodox fact but can also be the home of neglected details and forgotten documents than can unfix the status quo. As the pace of change in contemporary India accelerates and Indians turn from the past and fix their gaze on the future, what will become of the archive? Singh prompts us to imagine archives as not merely documents of dusty scholarship but as monuments of knowledge, beautiful in their unkempt order.

A clothbound documentation of Singh's travels with India's great classical musicians over six winters In the early 1980s, with her very first camera in hand, Dayanita Singh (born 1961) traveled throughout India for six winters with the tabla maestro Zakir Hussain, photographing several great classical musicians and creating an image archive of them on stage and backstage, in their homes and on the bus transporting them from concert to concert. When the time came for Singh to edit her work into a book, she chose to focus on the tanpura--a long-necked, four-stringed drone instrument that both evokes and supports the musician's voice, both during performance and the process of daily practice of riyaz. Museum of Tanpura celebrates the tanpura as a musician's constant companion, the environments and relationships which bring music into being, and embodies what Singh sees as her greatest lesson from the performers she befriended--the rigor and aesthetics of riyaz.

The archive has long been an obsession for Dayanita Singh. Both literal archives, treasuries of objects chosen with care and preserved against time; and the photobook as a moveable archive which the viewer can re-visit and display at will. In Pothi Khana (Hindi for “archive room”), Singh presents photographs of India’s seemingly endless private and public archives: shelf after shelf of bundles wrapped and knotted in pieces of cloth once colorful but now almost white with age. The documents within these bundles remain as secret and distant to Singh as to us, known only to the archivists who are curiously absent in her images, their presence implied from the spaces they normally inhabit: chairs, desks, doorways, halls. Originally exhibited in 2018 at the 57th Carnegie International as a group of modular, pillar-like wooden structures whose photographs could be endlessly re-sequenced, Singh now transforms the mobile sensibility of Pothi Khana into a volume which she sees as a compendium to File Room, published by Steidl in 2013, and her latest expression of the book as a suggestive, self-determined space, both material and imagined.

A photographic archive of dance in its manifold forms, from Bollywood to classical dance Ever since Museum of Chance (2015), and particularly in her award-winning Museum Bhavan (2017), Dayanita Singh (born 1961) has created museums in book form--little offset symphonies that create a fluid space between the museum/gallery and publishing. Now, in Museum of Dance, Singh collects all the images of people dancing that she made in the 1980s and '90s--from her mother, Nony Singh, her friend and collaborator Mona Ahmed (subject of Singh's 2001 visual novel Myself Mona Ahmed), to classical dancers and the renowned Bollywood choreographer Masterji. Published to coincide with her traveling retrospective Dancing with the Camera, this book is Singh's tribute to dance, as well as her exploration of photography and bookmaking as metaphorical forms of dance--where rehearsed and spontaneous rhythms combine through intuition in unpredictable ways.

Accompanying Singh’s first touring retrospective, this survey includes previously unseen early works, favorite series and new montages The internationally acclaimed photographer Dayanita Singh often describes herself as a “book artist.” Accordingly, Singh was closely involved in the making of this magnificent exhibition catalog, which accompanies a major touring retrospective of Singh’s work, curated by Stephanie Rosenthal for the Gropius Bau.The most comprehensive publication yet published on Singh’s photographic art, it includes a series of long-form and short-form scholarly essays, full-color reproductions and installation images. The texts situate Singh’s work in relation to topics such as Indian classical music, photographic lineages and traditions, conceptions of the archive, choreography and the economies of reproduction.Presenting every important phase in the photographer’s oeuvre, Dancing with My Camera also enters Singh’s archive to include never-before-seen early works from the 1980s, a new series of montages and the works Let’s See, Museum of Chance, Museum of Shedding, I Am as I Am, Go Away Closer and Box 507 , among others.Dayanita Singh (born 1961) is one of today’s most important photographers. Her solo exhibitions have been held at MMK, Frankfurt; Hayward Gallery, London; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Focusing on the theme of archives, this book highlights Dayanita Singh's innovative approach to photography, celebrating her as the 2022 Hasselblad Award winner. It features her visual essay "Sea of Files" and introduces "Museum of Innocence (The Madras Chapter)," showcasing her exploration of cultural experience and memory. Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk contributes a personal essay reflecting on the emotional depth of Singh's work, which blends humanist portraiture with inventive display methods, challenging conventional museum and publishing paradigms.

Exploring the innovative concept of a book as an evolving art form, this work showcases Dayanita Singh's journey from her first publication to her recent creations. It highlights her unique approach to transforming books into multi-dimensional objects that challenge traditional definitions. The narrative details her collaboration with Gerhard Steidl, illustrating how Singh's works, such as Museum of Chance, have transitioned through various formats. Accompanied by images and DIY instructions, readers are invited to engage with her art, becoming curators of their own exhibitions.

Exploring the interplay between architecture and furniture, this work features photographs of chairs found in spaces designed by the influential South Asian architect Geoffrey Bawa. Each chair is portrayed with distinct personalities, reflecting Singh's view of them as more than mere objects. Celebrating Bawa's centenary, the book is designed as an accordion-fold booklet, allowing readers to engage with the content in a curatorial manner, transforming the experience into an interactive exhibition.