“Why don’t I interview you today?” asks the 54-year-old woman dressed in an ikat kurta the moment we step into her spacious residence in Vasant Vihar. There’s a chance Dayanita Singh would stop you short before you get to your questions. Around us are images, mostly black-and-white, framed on walls or embedded in teak panels that fold and unfold like Chinese screens. A small Subodh Gupta utensil installation hangs from the ceiling in one corner of a minimally furnished room. Singh, the Delhi-based artist and an “image maker”, a term she selectively uses for herself instead of a photographer, likes to cut to the chase. She settles down opposite us and places her iPhone 6s on the table. We are here to talk about her presence on Instagram, which author and photographer Teju Cole once called “dreamy, associative and archive-obsessed work”. “So, why do you use Instagram?” she asks me. Mostly as a personal space, I say. Her face relaxes, she looks satisfied. “This, to me, is the most beautiful reason to photograph,” she says. “Instagram is something that tries to get photographers to understand that it is your voice. This is what is going to change photography: when we stop doing things as photographers.” Away from the world of museums and archives of her construct — be it the Museum of Little Ladies with mother Nony Singh, dedicated to women, or The File Museum, an elegy to files and papers in the age of digitisation, or the ones that go deeper into specifics such as the Museum of Furniture, Museum of Machines or the Museum of Vitrines – her Instagram realm is a stark contrast. Here, we are introduced to light banter – a flower once in a while, pigeonholes in a college staff room, furniture set at peculiar angles, texts and people in her life. This space isn’t necessarily what one would call photography in the strictest sense. And here, it is not supposed to be. At home, a dinner the previous night has her taking Instagram photos of a flower illuminated with a light or a candle. The next one is a very short video of author Siddhartha Mukherjee in the middle of a reading. Her favourite Instagrammer is the curator, Hans Ulrich-Obrist, who posts only text-based images, mostly scribbled on pieces of paper, making for an unconventional narrative. “Are these a photographer’s work?” she asks. No. Singh sees great hope in this. “To me the magic of photography is not in making the image. That is just raw material. It’s what you do with the image. The greatest aspect of photography is its dissemination,” she says. The application takes many forms, and Singh believes in stretching its possibilities. Her feed suggests a flow curated with precision, with hashtags such as #afloweraday or #dreamvilla, or a series of museum hashtags that hint at a non-linear movement. “I think my next book will somehow be a take on Instagram. I love building museums and archives. Here, I can keep building them,” she says. Every week, she changes the setting of her foldable and mobile museum at the ongoing show at Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in Delhi and posts an image. “Nobody is crazy to visit every week to see it. So I put it on Instagram. It’s a great way of recording things in transition. I can make my own catalogue, my own museum, my own novel,” she says. No work on Instagram is a reproduction of images made on her camera, or vice-versa. “I don’t want to use this as a platform to show you my work. If you want to know my work, you go to my website. There is an Instagram self and then there is a Hasselblad self. I try to keep them separate,” she says. So in an image-frenzy world, where images are ephemeral, how well will a digital platform keep up? Singh says, “I ask people, ‘Why do you photograph?’, and they say, ‘To preserve our memories’. But they don’t back up. They don’t make prints. The only way to make it last is to take a print,” she says, “I suggest to photographers that they become photo archivists of people.” An archivist in a digital world? It’s a paradox Singh can live with.
