DAYANITA SINGH

Dayanita Singh (born in 1961) is a photographer born and based in New Delhi, who has published several books with her work. She is considered to be the most important figure in in contemporary Indian photography. A big part of her work revolves around people and their life in India, a big part of this work being in black and white. The photography I chose belongs to the book ‘’Dream Villa’’, published in 2008,  which centres in the mystery of everyday spaces when they are transformed by the darkness of the night. She uses colour photography and juxtaposes artificial and natural lights to create an enigmatic atmosphere, in which part of the image appear, shown by different gradients of light, and part of the image is hidden in the darkness.

The image I chose shows a tree being lighten by a diagonal light that goes down from the top left of the image and a grass part of which is also lighten seemingly by another source of light. Parts of the image gradually vanish in the darkness making an apparently simple and uninteresting view seem mysterious and even a bit unsettling. This image talks more about what’s hidden in the darkness than about what we can see. I chose this image because I feel it relates to my theme, giving the sense of something that cannot fully be seen or understood, like it often happens in dreams or something that we can’t totally grasp, like an old memory.