Photo Lies by Dayanita Singh

Somak Ghoshal investigates the architectural montages of the celebrated photographer and provokes us to rethink our "ways of seeing".

- Somak Ghoshal

Dayanita Singh is holding up one of her photographs on a video call for me to see. It's a beautiful black-and-white composition of an interior space. The light catches the walls at sharp angles, teasing out shapes from among the shadows. At a glance, it looks like a room in Japan, though the flooring doesn't seem congruent, nor do some of the finer details.

And then, Singh gently peels away a layer from the image, as though she is opening up a pop-up book, like a conjuror performing a trick. In an instant, the illusion of the original is shattered. What had seemed at first a single photo is revealed to be a composite, created by putting sections of two different photographs that had been cut straight, or in a Z shape, then put on top of one another to create a mysterious third. The result, which Singh calls an "architectural montage", is an entirely new entity, with its own character and identity. It's like oxygen fusing with hydrogen to form an altogether new compound: water.

It's not unexpected that Singh should come up with such a radical move, but even by her standards, the montage format is a masterstroke. "To the best of my knowledge, no photographer has created montages of their own photos," she says. "I can now dislocate my work and change the 'where' and 'when' of it as I wish."

Over a decade ago, Singh began to depart from the trappings of her medium. "I used to hate it when people asked me where and when a photograph had been taken," she says. Photography, for her, was the raw material to create work that broke new ground. The image on the wall of the white cube was never enough.