About Book
What can a photographer in India capture on film other than disasters or the exotic? Dayanita Singh was preoccupied by this question after she had spent many years documenting the poverty in her homeland. Her answer was a return to the world from which she came, to India's extended, well-to-do families and their fine homes. Both on commission and on her own, she photographed friends and friends of friends, creating a portrait of another society, complete with its traditional and post-colonial symbols of prosperity.
The self-confident elite of the country is nearly unknown in the West. Privacy provides great insight into a closed world characterized by tight family solidarity. Singh shows the people as they would like to see themselves, in the middle of splendidly decorated rooms and surrounded by possessions that represent their self-image. At a certain point in her work Singh realized that even without their residents, the rooms were occupied by the invisible generations that had lived there before. The book closes with photographs of interiors, empty but still filled with spirits.
About Author
Dayanita Singh (born 1961) is an Indian photographer, lives and works in New Delhi and now also is partly based in Goa, who is known for her portraits of India's urban middle and upper class families. Most of her work is in black-and-white, though of late she has also delved into colour, and starting in 1980s she worked as a photo journalist on assignments for international magazines and newspapers, including the New York Times, before switching to documentary-style and portrait photography. Over the years, she has published several books, including Myself Mona Ahmed (2001) and Go Away Closer (2007). and shown at galleries in Rome, New York, Berlin, London, Milan and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Many of her works, are now part of the collection of National Gallery of Modern Art, Delhi. She received the 2008 Prince Claus Award. and also the 2008 Gardner Photography.