 Dayanita Singh's book of photographs, released this week, is called Dayanita Singh. The title could be interpreted as vanity or, simplicity. The real reason though is that the artiste sees little bits of herself in the images she captures.
For all its intricacies, it's a minimalist world, functional and unpretentious, but seen with such sympathy as to make it her own, both its beauty and ugliness. And, normally, what happens when you make your world belong to you is that you stop judging it.
Dayanita herself is not very different from the technique of her craft. "I am a simple and happy person, someone who likes to record the people and places I pass through. A sort of conservationist." In a career that started accidentally at the age of 18,when Dayanita was a student of NID, where she was fascinated with the curlicued mysteries of the Font, she has recorded and conserved a considerable world that we hardly notice is nearly gone, if only because we are going - changing - with it.
On an assignment from NID to shoot Zakir Hussain, a stage manager's sudden strictures caused Dayanita to fall and hurt herself. She rose from the ground, a composition morphing back into symmetry, determined to be a photographer.
Hussain later invited the young Dayanita for a private session, and still continues to be her mentor. So, in a way, music is the reason why Dayanita is a photographer, and perhaps because of it, the rhythms in her images are palpable.
"Photography is no longer a technique. The technology is so advanced and accessible that even a child could master it in half an hour. More than ever, photography is a whole language by itself. Some people say a line with it. Or, a paragraph. I want to be able to narrate whole novels through images. I see the world framed in words. I read a book, maybe a novel by Orhan Pamuk or Italo Calvino or a poem by Rilke, and I am inspired to see the objects around me in a different light. What I see is what I feel", she said. There is certainly a lot of seeing here.
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