About Book
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.
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.