Dayanita Singh: Let’s See

Let’s See is a photo-novel of Dayanita Singh’s earliest years as a photographer, a return to a time when she did not yet consider herself a photographer, the probing remembrance of an eye I no longer have access to. Singh has recently poured through 40 years of her archive-80% of which remains unseen-exploring scans of her contact sheets and being amazed by the gentle and tender images from the 1980s and ‘90s she had since forgotten-hostel roommates, friends with whom she lived, family, weddings, funerals; portraits of herself and those who would become important characters in her life: her mother Nony Singh, Zakir Hussain, Mona Ahmed whom she depicted in the emotive visual biography Myself Mona Ahmed (2001).

Singh’s first camera, a Pentax ME Super with a 50mm lens, was a gift from the German publisher Ernst Battenberg (1927-92), and with it she made photos of everything I could, trying to make a roll of film last as long as possible, creating contact sheets of all her images, but realizing the rare luxury of an individual print only for a publication or a book project. I call this book Let’s See, says Singh, because these images are about exactly that: how we see, what we don’t see, what only the camera sees…