Photo Feature: Dayanita Singh
Photo Feature: Dayanita Singh
Photo Feature: Dayanita Singh
Dayanita Singh is a photographer whose primary format is the book. She studied Visual Communication at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad and Documentary Photography at the International Center of Photography in New York City. Dayanita Singh has published 14 books throughout her career. Her books rarely include text; instead she lets the photographs communicate and speak for themselves. These ideas are furthered through her experimentation with alternate ways of producing and viewing photographs to explore how people relate to photographic images.
Singh has created and displayed a series of mobile museums, giving her the space to constantly sequence, edit, and archive her images, in large part due to her interest in archives. Each mobile museum contains 70 to 100 photographs displayed in wooden vertical frames.
On a personal note, while Dayanita uses less text in a book and lets the image speak for itself, one can’t help but wonder about the placement of the image on the page. This brings back memories of studying graphical appeal of photographs in California. The entire page is an image. The canvas is only bound by the size of the page.
Museum Bhavan has been shown at the Hayward Gallery, London (2013), the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2014), the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago (2014) and the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi (2016). Singh was awarded the Prince Claus Award in 2008. In 2013, she became the first Indian to have a solo show at London’s Hayward Gallery.
Dayanita Sign has quietly photographed Italy for 25 years. For the first time in its history, the Archivio di Stato in Venice will open to the public as an exhibition venue, with Dayanita Singh’s ARCHIVIO.
https://dayanitasingh.in/exhibitions/archivio/
The Archivio di Stato in Venice will be open to the public until 31st July, 2026.
ARCHIVIO is Singh’s tribute to both the Italian archives she has photographed over the past decade and to her own evolving archive of images made in Italy over the last 25 years. Opened to the public on 17 April 2026 at the Archivio di Stato in Venice, in conjunction with the 19th edition of the Incroci di civiltà international literature festival, the exhibition brings together two intertwined bodies of work: Singh’s long engagement with institutional archival repositories and her decades-long visual conversation with Italy’s architecture, interior spaces, artworks, friends, archivists, flowers and more.
Here is a video featuring Dayanita Singh talk about her exhibit of photographing 25 years of Italy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5VBdHaRleg
Singh has approached Italian cities not as monuments to be recorded but as living organisms to be listened to.
https://www.instagram.com/dayanitasingh/reels/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dayanita_Singh
