If the phone battery had not died Dayanita Singh would probably have begun conceptualising an entirely different story for the year-end Kochi Muziris Biennale where she is a participating artist. Chance plays a crucial role in the photographer-artist’s mental make-up and work process. Had this happened; had this not happened are open-ended situations that shape her work and something she consciously engages with.
As chance would have it, her plans for the day in the city were altered and she visited three libraries instead of perusing the archives. “Life has been a series of chances. I see chance as a sign.I realised early on that if I became a photographer I would give myself the chance of freedom. Bonny Thomas’ phone battery dying is a great example of my work process and life. I want to photograph each and every library in Kerala now. It may take two years,” she says.
The carefully composed frame, the one that speaks a thousand words, or one that tells the story are not her idea of a good photograph. In fact the search for a good photo is “a recipe for failure”.
She speaks of ridding the mind of conditionality to arrive at something that is original and fresh. “Read, read and read,” is her advice to young shutterbugs for that will open the mind to see the medium in different ways. Dayanita’s favourite authors are Geoff Dyer, Italo Calvino and Vikram Seth. She reads Michael Ondaatje for his language and editing.
Photographs by her, the 10x10 inch prints, are the medium with which she indulges in her passion for books. As a young girl she realised the book to be the form she most revelled in. She began clicking photographs to make books, becoming singular in the field.
Dayanita has to her credit 11 books in a career spanning 30 years. “It took me 30 years to have the confidence to declare that the book is my form.” The conventional photo exhibition never excited her as it was “too fixed” and her photo book, a perfect possession.
Her early work, a book on Zakir Hussain, came about by chance. Had the organiser not pushed the young student to fall down and miss her interview with the music maestro her assignment would have been a regular classroom exercise. A call from Zakir Hussain later led to a six-year engagement with the musician, shooting him in different aspects. The book is now a collector’s item and Zakir Hussain her first teacher. “He is a life guru. I learnt restraint, rigour and focus from him. I am still photographing him,” she says.
Dayanita continued to photograph people, her lens panning sensitively over personalities, like Rekha, Saroj Khan, Mona Ahmed to name a few. In 1999, people went out of her frame. It got busier with a sense of their presence, she says. “Obvious people limit the scope of work.”
A book on her transgender friend, Myself Mona Ahmed , 2001 was followed by eight books, and Dayanita had established herself as a unique book maker. She began collaborating with her publisher and writer working closely in deciding text and printing.
“I have no admiration for image makers. My admiration is for writers and artists who challenge themselves continuously,” she herself trying to push the frontiers, in her case, of the format of the book. It slowly began morphing into the current form as mobile museums. In 2012 the Museum Bhavan, a conglomerate of eight museums, stands as one of the highlights of her career displayed at the Hayward Gallery in London.
The foldable screen museum is Dayanita’s innovative method of engaging viewers with photographs allowing them flexibility of movement. For her too it gives the freedom of playing with images, often adding, subtracting and changing the story line if any. Colour is another of her experiments. Dream Villa , Blue Book and House of Love are coloured books. “Depending on the photograph, I decide colour.” Dayanita works in film on Hasselblad and in digital prints, besides using other cameras.
In preparation of any new project she allows herself an emptying out process. At this juncture, in the city, she is at “zero” imbibing hungrily fresh, new images. She is collating matter, unaware where it will take her. “Who knows, it may be a projection on low clouds,” she says dreamily. Till then she is wandering around with a camera in tow, watching the city and its people in the different lights.
On one such trip she found on the beach a bejewelled bride and a dashing groom posing for an album, dazzling “in the six o’clock light”.
By chance that may well be the start of her Kochi story.
