All That Remains:
AN Interview With Dayanita Singh

Rajesh punj

An opportunity to meet with the Indian photographer Dayanita Singh has become more improbable now that she exhibits more prolifically than when we first met in late 2008. As was evident in 2013 when I interviewed Singh prior to her retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, London. Recalling that interview for Art&Deal allows us an insight into some of the original motives for her taking pictures, and of how the individual lives she encountered in Kolkata played a major part in drawing the outside into her works. Moreover by embracing the energy and intimacy of the city Singh’s photographs would become an emotive biography of the landscape as a life force.

Small, slightly stocky, the urge to wrap your arms around her is overwhelming, as any notion to want to converse about the technicalities of photography are positively disrupted by her accommodating warmth. Burdened by the installation of her works for her impending solo show, and the hundreds of questions relating to that by the curatorial committee, our interview is subject to her having to leave at any moment.