W.M. Hunt

 #somereallygoodones, #dayanitasingh, #museumbhavan, #emforster, #onlyconnect

These essays are my reflections on how to look at photographs and by example how I look at them, most often teasing out what I think are the great ones.  Dayanita Singh is an artist but you don’t think of her work in terms of the individual images but rather her books.  These organize her photographs into accordion style — leporello — books that one can put on a shelf or hold in one’s hands to look at.   

The artist creates exhibitions — museums — scaled to the individual, with one on one intimacy  She says the “when she I began editing these museums, she “decided to go not just by themes, but also tonally.” *1

The series of images are printed as tritones, each slightly larger than the original 6-by-6 negatives.  Titles include “Printing Press Museum”, “Museum of Vitrines”, “Museum of Machines, “Museum of Shedding”, “Museum of Chance”, and “Little Ladies Museum” for example.  The subject matter is often about books themselves, being printed or arranged on library shelves. 

Her publisher Gerhard Steidl has said “I always believed that the photobook is a gallery of photography in book form.  Ideally it’s an art object: a multiple, not signed and numbered, not in an edition.  I see it as a tool to bring photography into the hands of everybody who is interested.” *2  

The museums behave like family albums in which the single photographer is especially gifted and sensitive.  The genius for me is Singh’s insistence on looking in a fresh way, asking us to in E.M. Forster words “only connect”*2  That is what a great photograph or, by extension, a great photographic book, does.

*1 Uma Nair, AD, 20 November 2017

*2 Liz Jobey, FT Magazine, “Dayanita Singh: ‘Why should photography be stuck on the wall?”, September 20, 2019

*3 Epigraph to E.M Forster’s “Howards’ End” (1910).  The whole statement is “Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.”

©2022

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