30r364 boek.qxd:awards book 11 - Prince Claus Fund

Dayanita SinghIndiaDayanita Singh (b. 1961, New Delhi) is a master photographer who offers an acute vision ofcontemporary Indian realities that have been hidden or ignored. Early projects centred on theexperience of women in various communities, such as a girl in a Benares ashram (I am as I am,1999). Singh’s photo-book Myself Mona Ahmed (2001) includes written self-descriptions bythe eunuch whose life is portrayed, a pioneering attempt at allowing the photographic subjectself-representation. Singh then turned her lens on the rising wealthy class (Privacy, 2003),documenting India’s new elite in their fine homes surrounded by symbols of both traditional andpost-colonial prosperity. She has also captured the ruined environment of the old elite of Goaand recent work concerns human absence/presence in places and objects.The quality of her compositions, with precise control of every element within the frame andpoetic play of light and shadow, and the intellectual insight and subtle social commentary inher focus on the private and the interior, have won international acclaim and influenced the newgeneration of local photographers.Dayanita Singh is awarded for the outstanding quality of her images, for providing a complexand well-articulated view of contemporary India, and for introducing a new aesthetic into Indianphotography.[from the 2008 Prince Claus Awards Jury Report]Culture and the Human Body81