"You’ve mentioned a couple of times that Italo Calvino is one of your most beloved writers. In The Adventure of a Photographer, the main character says that ‘in order to really live, you must photograph as much as you can… you must either live in the most photographable way possible, or else consider photographable every moment of your life. The first course leads to stupidity, the second to madness’. Do you think photography is inherently futile?"
Dayanita Singh - That’s a beautiful quote, but I think it only makes sense if you think of photography as an end in itself. But if you’re not interested in photography as pure documentation, it frees you to do so much more. My work, Time Measures, is titled after the name of one of Sebald’s poems.
I photographed these bundles of documents wrapped in fabric that I found in an archive in India. The viewer never finds out what the documents are or what they look like, and I never did unwrap them either.Does this then mean that the photographs are pointless?
Whenever people ask me how to become a good photographer, I tell them to read, jump into the world of literature. I hand them a copy of Austerlitz by Sebald, and tell them to come back to me when they’re done with it. Nobody ever comes back to me because that’s not the kind of photography they want to do.
They’re interested in instant gratification, going around with their big cameras, snapping photographs quickly without thinking. Can we raise the bar higher?
- An excerpt from an interview of famed Photographer Dayanita Singh with Apollo Magazine.
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