Dayanita Singh describes herself as a ‘book maker working with photography’. She was born in 1961 in New Delhi, and studied Visual Communication at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad and Documentary Photography at the International Center of Photography in New York. Singh has published ten books. The most recent, File Room, was published in 2013. Her first book, Zakir Hussain (1986) was the result of a student assignment. During the 1980s, she travelled with the virtuoso tabla player and his fellow musicians on six winter tours, photographing them for her graduation project.
Singh regards Zakir Hussain as her ‘true mentor’ and says, ‘I discovered photography through him; what I learnt from him was that single-minded focus, that obsession with what one did.’ In 1989, a photojournalistic commission led to her first encounter with the person who has since become her greatest friend, the grand eunuch Mona Ahmed. Singh went on to photograph Mona and her changing world over the course of thirteen years, and together they created Myself Mona Ahmed (2001), a mix of photo essay, biography, autobiography and fiction.
Since then, Singh has created books in which she plays with different forms of visual narration. She has produced novels without words, and photo fictions in which suites of images act as clues or suggestions, where the ‘story’ is what the reader makes of it, or what they bring to it. Recently, with her Museum structures, Singh has created what she says might be called ‘a giant book’, full of secrets and clues. These mobile Museums embody Singh's thinking around the form of the book to create a new way of exhibiting her photography.
Asked where she lives, Dayanita Singh replies, ‘It’s impossible to say in this day and age. I say I live in my suitcase, which is sometimes parked in Delhi or Goa or Bombay or Calcutta or Varanasi or London or Florence or Boston or Göttingen. It is the fate of the times we live in and the work one makes.’