Dayanita Singh comes back to the Rencontres d’Arles this year and chooses to confuse issues a little more. She has opted to combine the latest, enigmatic element of her personal work, Go Away Closer, with images of an unknown photographer she has only recently “discovered”: her mother! Over the last few decisive years of her photographic career, Dayanita Singh has been slowly freeing herself from the abounding clichés associated with her country, enticing her public into the labyrinths of her colourless world. Her art is savagely opposed to any notion of Indian Identity; she leaves it up to us to seek out the paths that pave her Family Saga (decidedly Indian!), overloaded with “love, memories and loss”. Dayanita allows us to find our own egress and benefit from our straying.When she suggests to her 75-year-old mother that she exhibit alongside her for the first time in Arles, Dayanita knows that, together, they will be setting their sights very high. This is because her mother, Nony, is an accomplished amateur photographer; she has photographed Dayanita, her sisters and her husband Mahinder. Dayanita has brought back to life family negatives, cheap prints and albums – one of which is totally astounding and made up of photos of her Husband’s girlfriends and compiled by Nony herself. These are shattering in their intensity and forcefulness. Dayanita is aware of this because these very images have inspired some of the enigmas that nourish her own work. United in photography for the first time, these two ladies take us on a very weird and wonderful journey indeed. Alain Willaume
 
DAYANITA SINGH
Go away closer
Dayanita Singh chronicles lost moments of intense vision. She collects images from nowhere, similar to a déjà vu from a great distance, suddenly meeting us in the here and now. They illuminate the idea of somewhere or other almost magically, precisely because place and time are eliminated. Singh has developed her own photographic language, creating narrative horizons that remain open to any viewer or reader. The photographer has disappeared completely as a source of information, and the idea of the photograph as an all-embracing image of a complete, valid story that has only to be understood and followed through has been set aside. Singh’s photographs are looking for viewers who will edit them, imaginatively, charging the images that can be gleaned from them with possible stories from their own experiences, informing them with their cultural and psychological cast of mind. The artist’s photographs offer certain linguistic elements, syllables and embryonic words. No image is formed until viewers interpret and read these elements, emphasizing them in their own way. Hence Dayanita Singh’s photographs remain untitled and undated; readers of her photographs are intended and entitled to lose themselves in a ’Somewhere­land’ of the imagination. Go Away Closer – the title of the series touches on this ambivalence and the sense of being present and yet carried away that the images are tempting us to enjoy. Dayanita Singh’s photographic work stands on a narrow shelf in the kitchen of her flat in New Delhi – in the form of black-and-white contact prints in postcard-sized, hand-bound black books. An opportunity to flick through these, to allow yourself to be carried from image to image, from place to place, outside time and space, is among the most intensely felt moments that photography can afford. Singh calls these her ’journals’, bringing the series dating from the last two decades together here: her analysis of young women’s lives in an ashram in Benares (I Am As I Am) or young female sex workers in the big cities (Kamathipura Series), then her friendship with the eunuch Ahmed (Myself Mona Ahmed), lived out to the point of self-extinction, then, in a kind of counter-move to her own biographical roots, formal portraits of well-to-do Indian family clans (Privacy). Unpeopled interiors appear even in the Privacy series, and Singh continued this fascination for the open poetry of empty rooms in the Chairs, beds and images of images series, and also in the images in the Go Away Closer series – theatre interiors in Bombay and elsewhere, the surface of the water outside the Devigarh Fort Palace, the gleaming black floor of the Padmanabhapuram palace in south India, a factory in Puna, a wedding, all the images real, all the images unreal. “Go Away Closer – to me that ambiguous relationship one has with love and loss and memory but those words are so over used that at best one can allude to them. Wanting, not wanting, not being able to let go. And then your reading which may have nothing to do with my saga.” (Dayanita Singh)
Renate Wiehager

NONY SINGH
Nony & Nixi
At age seven I made a portrait of my mother in Pakistan during a family picnic. It is still one of my favorite pictures. In 1948 I was studying in a boarding school in Dehradun. I spent each month my pocket money (20 Rupees) on making photographs with my box camera, while my friends spent theirs on sweets. In January 1960, my husband to be, announced to his father that he had chosen to marry me. The most eligible bachelor had finally decided to marry. His Father was so happy and shocked that he gifted me his Zeiss Ikon that was slung on his shoulder. After my marriage, I opened a trunk that was filled with photographs of women and many of them dancing with my husband. He told me these were his girlfriends from around the world. My reaction to him was “what a disrespect to good photographs and is this the respect you give to women you once loved”. So I decided to fix all these photographs in an album, the album of my husbands girlfriends. What a Casanova he was. I pasted my photo on the last page! I photographed my daughters as they grew. Most of all I photographed my first born, Nixi, amazed at the wonder of having created a life, almost like God. After her birth my husband had taken me to the Oberoi hotel in Srinagar (Kashmir) We stayed in the presidents suite. I had never been inside a five star hotel and here I was staying in their grandest room. I placed my darling Nixi on the Chaise longue and made a picture to prove to my family that I had indeed stayed in the room. Then I photographed all the light fixtures, the beds, the view. Nixi from the start was a very artistic child. I still have her sketch books, her portraits at age 5. I thought to myself, this is a talent that I must ensure does not get smothered in the ups and downs of life. But she was very impatient with my photography, while I counted the steps to get her in focus. I dressed her as a gypsy for one fancy dress and that turned out to be quite prophetic. Even though I dressed her as Mother Mary I could tell her life would be far from a conventional one. She is now a famous photographer. I had to fight with my husband to send her to design school and once I became a widow I made sure she could follow her passion and not be dragged into family litigations. My last photo of her before she became a photographer herself, has my shadow on it ! In 1997 I went to Pakistan, 50 years after independence. I went to see the house I was born in, in Anarkali, Lahore. I visited the room I was born in and peeped into the tiny forbidden black room next door. It reminded me of my grandmother saying when we were naughty “behave or I will lock you in the dark room”. Of course we had all forgotten, my grandfather was a photographer, he died young and so the room was always locked. That was how the dark room entered our lives. And later Nixi would always sleep with the light on in her room. When my husband would tell her not to waste electricity, she said it was for the gods not to trip in the dark. My photography still continues even though I now use a digital camera, that my famous daughter brought me from abroad. She was the one who found all my old negatives and had them printed in 2000. I was so surprised with some of the photos, the lab had been cropping my square pictures into rectangles.I thought the camera saw less than my eyes all this time. But now this nice man says he wants to show them in France. I am not sure if he is just being kind to me. Nony Singh