Intimate Archive: Dayanita Singh, the Photo-book and Feminist Iteration

Abstract

Dayanita Singh (b. 1961) has long pursued a practise of close relationships with her subjects, human and otherwise. In pairing this commitment with disseminating her photographs through book and portable museum formats, in which photographs are reused over the course of decades, she has developed a practice that she recognises as fundamentally archival. This article examines two distinct elements of Singh’s oeuvre: Myself Mona Ahmed (2001), a book created with her friend Mona, a self-described ‘eunuch’ cast out of her community in Delhi; and File Room, a constantly unfolding project appearing in multiple book and museum formats, focused on the materiality and temporality of the archive. I read both as part of Singh’s ‘intimate archive’, and understand this thread in her work as a feminist practise, one that extends to her invitation to viewers to engage with the book and museum objects, reworking these images into new intimate archives.