Dayanita Singh makes the finest photo boxes. Elegantly carpentered wooden boxes, each of which holds 30 of her photographs. But Dayanita herself is unboxable. A few months ago, we met at a cafe in Colaba. She had brought with her a printed booklet of her newest work. It was titled Photo Lies. For the sea of visuals that I receive every day through email, Instagram, WhatsApp and such, you can imagine my joy at the rare occasion when a Dayanita Singh, winner of the 2022 Hasselblad Award, takes the trouble of printing her work, binding it in a book form, and places it in front of you. Sigh.
Photo Lies, I realized, were montages. A series of black and white images, obviously beautiful, but more: familiar, yet unrecognizable. I wondered if I saw something of Bijoy Jain in them, something Japanese, definitely ancient, always cinematic.
Two of those montages have made it to the cover of AD’s annual art issue (There are two different covers this time, each featuring a montage from Photo Lies—if you want to pick up a copy of each). Six more montages are inside—along with a very articulate essay by Somak Ghoshal. But each is not a single image of a single place, so that count is completely off. They are composites, physically cut and combined, no AI, no Photoshop, no digital manipulation. Just good old hand-cut, composed, fitted, re-fitted montages made from her own photographs. Like poetry, the lines, shadows, proportions, textures align and a new whole is born of old parts.
Of course, I am reminded of John Berger and his Ways of Seeing, the once-radical body of work that showed us—with words and images—that how we see is so tremendously “influenced by a host of assumptions concerning the nature of beauty, truth, personally, is less unnerving and more delightful. She makes one think: Am I seeing, or failing to see, or seeing without bias, because I can’t tell or have no knowledge anyway of what I’m seeing? Should I bother trying to recognize the works of masters? Or shall I just enjoy this universality of space-making? Does it then mean that my idea of beauty is not bound to factual knowledge: Who made it, what it is, where it is and so on. When Berger’s assumptions that influence my ways of seeing are taken away, what remains is quite freeing, in this instance at least.
I nevertheless look to her for answers, as she sits across the table from me, happily eating her salad. She just smiles with her big eyes. Child, woman, child.
This art special, the first issue of 2025, also features the AD100 list of 2025. While one can look at it as a hundred individual practices (plus 11 Hall of Famers), collectively it’s a composition of what aesthetics, design, and architecture in India currently look like. And if you look deeper, perhaps you’ll see the assumptions, histories, biases that shape our homes, or the work of memory, imagination, ingenuity and madness that crafts our spaces. Either way, my heartiest congratulations to everyone on the list this year. And for the new year, I wish for us all, an openness of thought, a sense of humour, and that pure delight in creative pursuits that I see in Dayanita Singh, every single time.
Art Director: Chandni Mehta
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