Dayanita Singh

"For eight years I worked as a photographer in India catering to western perceptions of what India is. I got fed up with working in worlds that I did not truly belong to – I could empathize with but never really understand what it means, say, to be a Bombay prostitute or a child laborer. I wanted to look at the India I come from, at the changing styles and relationships which are taking place inside well-off families who live in big cities, and particularly my own city, Delhi. When I showed this new work to some American editors, they couldn’t believe it was India (or if it was, then I had a gall to be photographing such people in a poverty-ridden country!) That just made me more determined. There are many versions of India, and this mine."
– Dayanita Singh, “Mother India,” Granta 57

Dayanita Singh was born in New Delhi. Singh studied Visual Communication at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, and she is a graduate of the Certificate Program in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at the International Center of Photography. Singh’s work has been published in Der Alltag, Donna, DU, Fortune, Granta, Independent magazine, India magazine, Marie Claire, Newsweek, the New Yorker, NZZ Magazin, the Philadelphia Enquirer, Reportage , SZ Magazin, and Time, among others. Internationally exhibited, Singh has also published Myself Mona Ahmed (Scalo, 2001). Singh’s work is included in the exhibition, Presence, which opens on February 4th at Sepia International/The Alkazi Collection, 148 W. 24 St., (www.sepia.org). Chairs, an exhibition by Dayanita Singh, will be on display at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, MA, February 11 – May 8 (www.gardnermuseum.org). Singh’s work will be included in the upcoming exhibition, Edge of Desire: Recent Art in India, co-presented by the Asia Society and the Queens Museum of Art (www.asiasociety.org).