Orhan Pamuk on Dayanita Singh’s mesmerising photos of India’s disintegrating archives
What has most drawn me to Singh’s work are the photographs collected in her books File Room and Museum of Chance. In these, we find black and white images of India’s vast state archives, storerooms and registry offices. As we leaf through these books, we become filled with an idea of poetic decrepitude and a sense of profundity: once upon a time, people slogged and toiled; they submitted countless requests; they sent petitions and filed lawsuits; they wrote about and classified each other’s activities; and, at the state’s encouragement and behest, they kept an uninterrupted record of it all.
Eventually, all this vigorous activity came to an end, and what was left behind were these documents, these files, these bags, and the metal shelves and cabinets that hold and preserve them all. Singh’s black and white images of those stacks of lead-grey folders, of metal, of old and faded papers – all of which seem to be covered in dust even when they were not – make me aware of what I would call “the texture of memory”....
Eventually, all this vigorous activity came to an end, and what was left behind were these documents, these files, these bags, and the metal shelves and cabinets that hold and preserve them all. Singh’s black and white images of those stacks of lead-grey folders, of metal, of old and faded papers – all of which seem to be covered in dust even when they were not – make me aware of what I would call “the texture of memory”....
