Unusual Framework

Dayanita Singh has combined her training in design with an eye for the extraordinary to create striking book-objects that create a whole new architecture for photography. One of India’s finest photographers, she shares with Pool her journey from mother’s muse to visual archivist…

 

How did your tryst with photography begin?

DS: It started when I was a few months old, when my mother placed me on a chaise longue at the Oberoi Hotel in Kashmir because she wanted to prove to her friends that she had been there. She photographed me to validate her own experiences. So, photography was the most annoying thing in my life and the only trauma of my otherwise very wonderful loving childhood.

When I went to NID to study visual communication, it was only because my mother had instilled in me that you have to be economically independent. I wanted to be an artist but she said that as an artist you’re not assured of making a living, so go for design. I didn’t have any larger ambitions, I wanted to be a typographer and spend my life just painting type fonts and building new type fonts.

In my first or second semester at NID, we were sent to photograph the moods of a person for a short course in photography. And I thought I would be very clever, I would go to a concert and photograph Zakir Hussain; so I went to IIM where he was playing and took photos. But at the concert somebody pushed me as I was taking a picture and I fell. As an 18-year-old, my pride was severely wounded and I sat outside crying, very upset. When Zakir Hussain came out after the concert, I stood up, put my hands on my hips, and said, “Mr. Hussain, I am a young student today but someday I’ll be an important photographer and then we will see.” He asked me to come to his hotel room the next morning to photograph him when he was doing his riyaaz.