Since 1992, Dayanita Singh has been photographing her India, capturing friends and their families, and friends of friends within their domestic environments on film. In the series, Family Portraits, she takes photographs of people who have time, money, servants, palatial homes and well-bred dogs. Dayanita Singh’s perspective on the lifestyles of her friends and acquaintances from traditional families depicts a way of life in India which, to date, has remained unknown to us, and which, even for many Indian people, is sequestered and unfamiliar. It is the gaze of an insider; an insight into a lifestyle that, in the west, is often presumed to be exclusive to the western metropolis. The photos offer surprising, personal details of contemporary Indian society. The manner in which Dayanita Singh portrays families in their traditionally furnished or modern interiors is reminiscent of the epic Indian novel, in which two or three extended families become a microcosm for the lives and conflicts of the entire sub-continent. Each individual photo documents one part of the kaleidoscope of India’s high society, which continues to be characterised by traditional values, by the vestiges of the English colonial system, and by the religions, standards and symbols that were central in the years following Independence. Since the 1990s, a pan-Indian identity has been evolving, where the internet and the international travel boom have facilitated both communication among the diaspora and widespread participation in a rapidly liberalised economy. Dayanita Singh’s photographs show large, urbane families which are, as such, barely, existent in contemporary western society. She shows us an India in transition, fragmented and in the process of westernisation, an India that oscillates between tradition and modernity. Dr. Britta Schmitz - Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof