Dayanita Singh’s File Room and Nony Singh: The Archivist – In conversation with Aveek Sen
A discussion on book-making, personal histories and photography
Book launch
4 April 2014, 6.30 pm
Galerie Max Mueller
Dayanita Singh’s File Room, (Steidl, 2013) is an elegy to paper in the age of the digitization of information and knowledge. The analogue photographer and bookmaker has a unique relationship with paper that is integral not only to the work of making of images, texts and memory, but also to a larger confrontation with chaos, mortality and disorder in the labyrinths of working bureaucratic archives in a country of more than a billion people.
Nony Singh was born in Lahore in 1936, and fled to Patiala with her family in 1947 during the Partition. She studied, got married, had four daughters, and now lives, in Delhi. She made her first photograph at the age of seven, and continued to photograph her family, especially her daughters, extensively, filling her home with her photographs. She became a widow in 1981, after which she went through three decades of intense litigation. She lives with her vast archive of files, photographs and albums, selections from which, together with essays on her life, work and compulsion to archive, form Nony Singh: The Archivist (2013).
Aveek Sen was awarded the 2009 Infinity Award for writing on photography by the International Center of Photography, and has contributed texts to Dayanita Singh’s File Room, House of Love and Nony Singh: The Archivist.
