Dayanita Singh: Work in Process

A three-part portrait of working conditions and the imagery of industry in India.

This book is Dayanita Singh’s (born 1961) meditative, sometimes melancholic exploration of work environments across India. Each of its three visual chapters springs from larger individual series in Singh’s archive which she has now reedited around the theme of work. The first series, Museum of Machines, presents black-and-white images of factory equipment, stately despite its grime, and only occasionally joined by human counterparts. Blue Book shows photographs of industrial landscapes Singh made on her wanderings—atypically in color, the serendipitous outcome of running out of black-and-white film—which form a poetic critique of the sites of labor. Go Away Closer returns us to black and white, and reveals the greatest range of subjects, from thousands of scooters in a warehouse to the charming clutter of a shop, and are taken from a series Singh originally edited according to what she calls the "note and feeling" of the images.