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Published in livemint, December 2011
Photographer Dayanita Singh’s book House of Love is this vivid dreamscape; a book of film stills that have yet to leave the dark room. She plays visualizer to a Proustian narrative, to the slow-motion descriptions of an insomniac who is unable to sleep in an unfamiliar hotel room in a town he doesn’t know too well.
One of the most significant photographers of our generation, Singh’s work has let go of context and captions over time. She has charted a different route, one that is less about capturing the moment and more about reflection. While she has shown herself to be a visual poet with her previous photo-books such as Go Away Closer (2007) and Dream Villa (2010), with this she takes on prose.
http://www.livemint.com/2011/12/01201658/An-insomniac8217s-guide-to.html?h=B
Published in Time Magazine , October 2010
Her most recent work, Dream Villa, elaborates on this same glacial stupefaction, featuring streets and curious urban abstractions shot at night. There is darkness here, and the ineffable disquiet of great, harrowing art.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2022544,00.html
Published in the Telegraph, Culcutta, August 2010
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1100827/jsp/opinion/story_12854333.jsp
Published in The Telegraph, Calcutta, 19 March 2010
To those who are familiar with [Singh’s] earlier, black-and-white work… the elusive menace of Dream Villa, moving unpredictably from the tender to the lurid, moonscape indistinguishable from mindscape, will come as a shock. The desolate expanses of light turning into colour in Blue Book (2009), her first body of colour work, have intensified, in Dream Villa, into a world of the night whose denizens become something other than human in the uncanny light of a radically estranging gaze.
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1100319/jsp/opinion/story_12234912.jsp
Published in The Hindu, 22 February 2009
‘The works have no information — like captions — precisely because I think the “where and when” of photography gets in the way of your experience of the image. And I was not making a documentation of Indian industry.’ - Dayanita Singh.
http://www.hindu.com/mag/2009/02/22/stories/2009022250030200.htm
Published in Business Standard, 14 February 2009
Blue Book, Dayanita Singh’s new body of work, is actually a double entendre. It’s both a series of photographs, hung on the walls of Nature Morte in India, and a slick book of postcards, produced by Steidl publishers in Germany. The thing is, Dayanita intended it to be that way. It is her intervention in the art market. The book ensures you can own the images, if not as the expensive prints, then as high quality postcards. Photography is a medium that allows for this latitude, and Dayanita stretches it out to the fullest.
http://www.business-standard.com/india/storypage.php?autono=348967
Published in Frieze, 8 December 2008
In ‘Dream Villa,’ the largest single body of her colour work shown to date, Singh explores the mysteriousness of ordinary spaces obscured in darkness. She exploits colour photography’s unique ability to reproduce gradations of colour and density in light, juxtaposing artificial lighting with moody night skies.
http://www.frieze.com/shows/review/dayanita_singh/
Related Exhibitions: Dayanita Singh: Dream Villa
Published in ShahidulNews, 6 December 2008
[Dayanita] had been questioning her own work for some time. Questioning her ’success’ at producing images that regurgitated the “India” the west already knew. She chose to become a mirror to herself, and in that process begin a journey that would create a window to an everyday world. An everydayness that other photographers had shunned.
http://shahidul.wordpress.com/2008/12/06/through-the-cracks-of-a-mirror/
Published in Financial Times, 22 November 2008
In her newest series, Dream Villa, [Singh] focuses once again on the empty places in this most populated of countries… and now, in a departure from her signature black and white, she is using colour - not to reflect the famously vivid Indian palette but, unexpectedly, to capture the shifting facets of the Indian night.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/73e1657a-b838-11dd-ac6d-0000779fd18c.html?nclick_check=1
Related Exhibitions: Dayanita Singh: Dream Villa
Published in The Telegraph, Calcutta, India, 16 October 2008
Dayanita Singh’s Sent A Letter (Steidl, 2007) grew out of what she describes as a “diary-like way” of photographing that she started around the year 2000. She would take photographs while walking around a city or travelling together with, or simply thinking about, a friend…
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1081016/jsp/opinion/story_9971108.jsp
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