The greatest privilege for me is when my work lives in people’s homes: Dayanita Singh

The photographer, who has won the prestigious Hasselblad Award, says it has much to do with the book objects and the museums she has created

,Dayanita Singh, distinguished artist, recently won the prestigious Hasselblad Award, 2022. In this excerpted interview, she reflects upon the importance of non-Western contexts of image production and reception, new paradigms of aesthetic engagement and how she continually re-defines her own practice by transforming, both conceptually and materially, the form of photography.

How did you respond to receiving one the most important awards for the arts?

When they told me about the award, I thought: it can’t be, why me? And then I realised, it’s all those book objects and the museums that I have been creating. For many years, I had been trying to shift the print from the wall, the book from the bookshelf, to free photography from itself. I like to think the award acknowledges that.

I never, in my wildest dreams, thought I would get the Hasselblad Award because the list of previous awardees goes back to all the ‘masters’ — Ansel Adams to Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank to Daido Moriyama, to last year’s winner Alfredo Jaar — all the people one studied, admires, contradicts and is in conversation with. It is the most prestigious award in photography given to recognise and validate major shifts in the medium.

Apart from the very formal award ceremony, which will be held in Gothenburg in October, the Hasselblad Foundation also commissions an exhibition and a book, inviting a writer to be in conversation with the awardee’s work. They asked Orhan Pamuk and he said yes!

With your ongoing retrospective at Gropius Bau in Berlin, one sees many image horizons and media thresholds constantly being crossed in terms of form. How does it mark your journey as a photographer?

It’s been 13 years since I made Sent a Letter, the box that holds within it seven miniature exhibitions. I was desperate to find another form for photography, and to create a space between the gallery and the publisher. In the exhibition at Gropius Bau, there is a room of silver prints from Go Away Closer, a room with Sent a Letter (Steidl) in vitrines, then another room with the large wooden Museum of Chance. The next room has the Zakir Hussain maquette (Steidl) on the wall. The amazing thing to me, is that each work holds the room, whether it’s the prints on the wall, the book object, or the large mobile museums. All on par with each other. Of course this also has to do with the finest curating by Stephanie Rosenthal.