Robert Gardner Fellow in Photography 2008
Dayanita Singh was born in 1961 in New Delhi. She studied visual communication at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad and documentary photography at the International Center of Photography in New York. She has worked as a photojournalist for many international publications including Der Alltag, Fortune, Newsweek, New Yorker, India Magazine, SZ Magazine, and Time. Her work has been exhibited internationally in Zurich, New Delhi, Brussels, Stockholm, London, Berlin, Milan, Boston, and New York among others. She has also published five books of her photographs: Zakir Hussain (1986), Myself, Mona Ahmed (2001), Privacy (2003), Chairs (2005), and Go Away Closer (2007). Dayanita Singh lives and works in New Delhi.
During the fellowship year, Ms. Singh will be photographing the India that is slipping through the cracks, unnoticed, uncelebrated, in the rush to keep up, to modernize, globalize, westernize. Already lost in Delhi and Bombay, this India can still be found in Benares and Calcutta In Calcutta, there is a man who has spent his life sculpting from the clay of the Ganges each of the ten fingers for each of the ten hands of the goddess Durga for the fall pujas. In Benares, there is a man who sells perfume that his family makes, from house to house; and a cotton man, who pulls out the cotton from old quilts and mattresses and fluffs them to life again. But there is also the foundry in Howrah, where barefoot and scarcely clothed men pour molten iron into handcrafted moulds, to be shipped to Germany and assembled into powerful precision machinery.
Ms. Singh plans a biographical element that could create a diary format for the resulting book and has titled her project My Indian Diary : “Where one jumps from the biggest steel factory in Jamshedpur to an evening in Florence back to the envelope maker in Calcutta and onto a wealthy wedding. Where the photographer is like the story teller who does not let you get too comfortable in what you are seeing, who reminds you again and again that this is not a world of the distant past but in the present, where Calcutta Jamshedpur, and Florence coexist. At least in my mind.”
